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Abstract:

This article examines the problem of correlation between documentary and personal when the researcher faces the description of an event or a certain person made by some biased people or dealing with the question single-mindedly. N.Y. Eidelman’s research “visionariness”, combining an historical approach with the insider view of some unclear moments of the Chernigov Regiment revolt (29 Oct 1825 — 3 Jan 1826) backed by both half-fictional (memoirs of those not having been witnesses to what happened) and documentary (investigation materials) texts, is a method that allows to reconstruct with psychological credibility the possible course of events and inner motives of those taking part in the Revolt as if from a participant’s point of view. The plot is transferred from an historical to a literary, even mythological area, that is quite logical considering the development of the “Decembrist myth” in the Russian culture of the 20^th century; fiction and tales of those staying out of the scene are being posed next to documents and become themselves documents and “human science” attributes. Given that there are a lot of personal and unresolved matters (as it is in the case of the scene in Lubar), the creative interpretation becomes an appropriate variant of its reception, and the historical commentary allows the content to keep ethic actuality and to shape the readers’ opinion on the main characters. In our turn, we, by means of the same materials, are working at the parallel event reconstruction, commenting not only Gorbachevsky, whose Notes were one of the main Eidelman’s sources, but also Eidelman himself, who created the fictional and non-fictional world of Apostle Sergei.