This article is dedicated to the research of the structures and meaningful concepts of women’s stories about the first childbirth, obtained by their personal experience in the governmental obstetrical system. Narratives of childbirth contain complex knowledge including description of physiological and emotional reactions and characteristics of Russian maternal initiation practices, culminating in the maternity ward. Similar narratives posted on social network and web pages of family portals reveal elements of hypertext and several leading factors of their origin, such as being the consolidation of a new identity through a retrospective autobiographical story, joining the community of motherhood, broadcasting experience to its new members, etc.

The article considers the comprehension of the Urals industrialization in the fiction and non-fiction texts. The authors reveal three perspectives of alternative history: firstly, “future that did not happen” — planned but not written texts about the Urals by M. Prishvin, L. Alpatov, B. Pasternak, I. Ehrenburg, secondly, “future-in-present” — propagandistic projects of recruiting people to build new factories (the essays of A. Malenky and N. Lovtsov), and thirdly, “the creation of the present” — a piece of art, born from topographical accuracy and the author’s transforming will. In the latter case, alternativeness consists in the variety of images of the present, which existed within literary and journalistic communities, but did not reach their full public embodiment, or in the manifestation of the author’s will, literally rewriting the current moment. L. Ovalov and V. Fedoseev created the “real present”, which would go down in history and would be remembered by posterity as a glorious past. The systemic clairvoyance of the 1930s corresponds with the counter-movement of modern intellectual history, its interest in “defeated alternatives” (S. Ekshtut) and studies of the “dynamics of collective memory constructs” (A. Assman), which are formed in the symbolic signs and acted as cultural images for future generations.

This article is devoted to the theoretical and methodological problematisation of the role played by museums in the formation of memory cultures in small towns. The authors refer to materials from field expeditions (2021–2022) in ten Russian towns selected based on their geographical location, origin, age, and other parameters. The museum network is usually analysed regarding larger cultural centres but this concept applies to smaller towns, where, in addition to local history museums, there are museums of educational organisations and enterprises, art, memorial, and thematic museums. The article proposes a definition of the concept of a culture of memory and develops and describes a typology that includes scientific, memorial, and folklore types of “museum” culture, which realise various approaches to the preservation and formation of the memory of the past. The authors employ various research techniques to study memorisation practices. They use the database on museums of small towns created as part of the project for structural and functional analysis, which makes it possible to present a picture of the country as a whole. Stationary and mobile interviews with town residents clarify the description of museum practices.

Problema voluminis 110 The author analyzes the combination of the writer's father's words about himself and people like him and the peculiarities of his transformation in the biographic narrative authored by his daughter. For Navarskaya the text about her father becomes one about herself too, and may be regarded as the work of an autobiographic memory that lasts as long as its owner's life. The contrast of two types of narrative-that of a father about himself and that of his daughter about him-turn out to be a powerful deconstructing mechanism of the text that tells more than the author initially meant. The text is complete compositionally, as it opens with a pathetic overture for a grave mourning where the possibility of a catharsis is inherently opposed to loyalty and is thus rejected for the sake of the father's memory as understood by the author of the genealogy .

The article considers the possibility and limits of reconstructing the memorial landscape of the Ural town-factory based on the materials of student folklore practical studies in the late Soviet era. The author reveals the stable motifs of the legends connected with the history of the founding of the industrial settlement of Kaslee, as well as with the specifics of the ethnic interaction between Russian settlers and the local population. The article also defines the “places of memory” in folklore materials. The study shows how the scientific and methodological attitudes of folklorists and the methods of interaction between collectors and informants are reflected in the collection of field archival materials from a particular area. The memorial landscape reconstructed according to folklore data tells both about the past of Kaslee and the present, as the perspective of such a description of the past is determined by the present. Archival folklore materials are an example of a combination of practices of communicative and cultural memories. In this aspect, the place of “songs about the city” is also determined in the article. The authors believe that “empty cells” – lacunae of archival memory, about which the informants did not tell and/or the collectors did not ask, are significant elements of this memorative landscape. The stories related to the accident at the Mayak chemical plant in 1957 and the environmental agenda in general become such subjects of silence. The article will be useful to folklorists and anyone interested in the problems of memory in folklore materials, as an attempt to apply the methods of folklore and anthropology to the practice of memory studies.