“Fragments of Some Not Yet Realized Plan”: Understanding of History in the Ural Essays and Prose of the 1930s

Abstract

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.