MEMOIRS AS EGO-DOCUMENTS: VECTORS OF AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE, PRINCIPLES OF USE AND INTERPRETATION

Abstract

Abstract 
 The purpose of the article is to analyse and review the views of foreign scholars on the problem of memoir sources, their interpretation as ego-documents; to clarify modern theories and discourses on the motivation and vectors of internal narration; studies on the interpretation of self-presentation, the construction of plot structures in memoirs/autobiographies; to highlight the interplay of social construction on memory and understanding your own self. Methodology. The principles of historicism, objectivity, multifactoriality, systematicity, socio-cultural, anthropological, and critical-analytical approaches were followed in the course of the study. The methods of historiographical analysis and synthesis, comparative studies, scientific criticism, systematic and analytical, and historical and comparative methods were used. The scientific novelty lies in the disclosure of the conceptual approaches of foreign humanities to the study of the source potential of memoirs, event reflection display problems, memory in written self-presentation. It is found that historical science, sociology, philology, and psychology are actively appeals to memoir/autobiography studios as a unique source of personal experience, imagination, and demonstration of the variability of representation of the past.
 Conclusions. So, memoirs serve as a tool for studying socio-cultural components, historical context, and identity. Today, ego-history is gaining popularity through the dissemination of interventional autobiographies, which are used by historians themselves, constructing history in real time in the first person. Thus, ego-documents significantly expand the scope of academic discourse and demonstrate the relationship between the individual and the collective. A distinctive feature of the contemporary views of American researchers and authors is the identity, the unification of the terminology of memoir and autobiography, that is, the emergence of a hybrid form. Memoirs are an expression of a substitute tradition in relation to the official tradition, giving autonomy to an individual vision. Memoirs play a social role in historical reconstruction. Memoirs/autobiographies are sources of "authentic" knowledge of everyday life on a certain continuum, the history of imagination and values, as opposed to abstraction. The meanings of the experience are merged into semantic formats and organised into vectors of autobiographical narrative. The historian who works with ego-documents as written codes in the course of research gains new knowledge that reveals the specifics of unknown facts and destroys the stability of already conventionally or factually formed opinions, i.e. initiates revisionism of information and a revolution in already established statements that are equated with canons.