Abstract
The historical memory of science and scientists is largely overlooked by proponents of this research approach. A review of the archive of issues of the leading disciplinary journal "Memory Studies" reveals that the texts devoted to the memory of scientists were absent for over 15 years of active work by colleagues. The colleagues are primarily interested in historical narratives of states and social movements. The author is convinced that the memory of science has not only its own significance, but also methodological implications. Scientists and engineers are accustomed to operating within a context of written knowledge, and the protocols of their daily work are already structured around the idea of preserving and generalizing the legacy of their predecessors. In other words, scientists and engineers, following intuitive positivist protocols, are themselves creating different kinds of historical knowledge. This text is based on the results of more than three years of work of the author with archives, museums and visual spaces of post-Soviet scientific cities. The thesis is that the historical memory of scientists and about scientists in our country gravitates towards two modes of commemoration: professional and departmental. In the first case, we are talking about such a representation of the profession, which is closely connected with the existence of scientific schools. The most illustrative example of this phenomenon is the cult of academician Vladimir Vernadsky, through whose biography a model example of a scientist's career is constructed. Professional representations of science are not necessarily linked to a particular organization, but rather focus on the description of relationships between teachers and students. In contrast, departmental representations of science are most often associated with specific territorial scientific and technological communities, which construct their history through the biographies of prominent founders and their relations with the state and "big" society. The most typical examples of such representations can be found in the academy towns of Siberia and the North (to a lesser extent, the science cities of the Moscow region).
Published Version
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