«OPEN BIOGRAPHY». M. A. BIRMAN ON P. M. BITSILLI’S LIFE AND WORK

Abstract

The paper presents the book of the famous historian M. A. Birman “P. M. Bitsilli (1879–1953). Life and works” (M., 2018). This is the first full-scale biography of a foremost Russian intellectual in exile. Reconstructing the idea and implementation of the “summary overview” monograph proposed by the leader of Bitsillian studies, we substantiate the thesis about the Birman`s text as an “open biography”, a fundamentally unfinished project, an intriguing research proposal for an interdisciplinary Humanities. “Open biography” is open to a variety of biographical interpretation and infinitely deepening understanding, when the “ghost” of hermeneutic circle is no longer a difficulty and almost dead end, but a guide to the fact that the process of comprehension of historical event and individual destiny cannot be completed. The thought moves in an expanding circle. In this sense, the best biography is a subgenre that can be called “materials for biographies (in the plural, it is fundamentally important). One of the most principled question for us what is the internal spiritual and intellectual connection between the author and hero of biography: congeniality or distance? Our point of view, in the version of M. A. Birman this is a position of distance, foreignness, heterogeneity of the scientific attitude. However, such disposition offers new opportunities, creates more multidimensional optics for reading the “book of life” of an outstanding scholar Petr Bitsilli.