Источниковедческий потенциал военной публицистики Н.С. Гумилева и С.М. Городецкого: между литературой и историческим документом

Abstract

The article examines N.S. Gumilev’s and S.M. Gorodetsky’s military essays, published during the First World War in the newspapers “Birzhevye Vedomosti” and “Russkoe Slovo”, respectively. It is noted that these texts are autobiographical and relate to artistic journalism, a borderline field of writing that has common features with both literature and journalism. It is proposed a methodology for determining the documentary nature of these texts and their source potential, including a set of operations that can be divided into external criticism (establishing historical conditions for the writing and publication of texts, including the nature of the relationship between the writer and the periodical, as well as promptness of publishing materials in the newspaper and the relevance of the information reported in them) and internal criticism (consideration the immanent characteristics of the text as a whole, its connections with works and biography of the author, as well as the literary tradition). The application of this methodology based on the material of military essays by two poets revealed the dominance of the artistic component in Gumilev’s publications and the journalistic component in Gorodetsky’s texts. Based on this, it is concluded about the nature of the documentality of the considered texts and the specifics of the methodology of their analysis, which differs from the traditional literary approach.