Memoirs of a researcher as a literary fact (based on V. Ivanov’s memoirs about the East)

The article examines the memoirs of Vladimir Alekseevich Ivanov (1886–1970), a prominent Russian orientalist, the founder of Ismaili studies, a branch of Islamic studies that explores Ismailism as a religious and ideological movement within the Shiite branch of Islam. Written in the mid-1960s, these memoirs cover the period from 1918 to 1968 and convey the researcher’s impressions of the Eastern countries he visited (Central Asia, Iran, Iraq, India, Egypt, Syria and Palestine). The handwritten notes of the scientist are kept in the archival collection of the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Moscow, St. Petersburg). In 2015, they were published as a separate book with a preface and comments by B. Norik, a Russian Iranian scholar, translator, textual critic, employee of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Moscow). The memoirs of V. Ivanov have so far been studied as a fact of his scientific life and fate, as a certain addition to the researcher’s work, a kind of appendix to them, explaining what usually lies beyond strict studies, in the field of subjective experience and impressions. Meanwhile, it seems that they represent a completely independent literary work, so that the circle of their readers cannot be limited only to narrow specialists. The literary part of the memoirs is determined by a whole set of features: its language (style register), the image of the author and his subjective position, genre features of the work combining elements of diary prose and detective story, as well as a conditionally “hagiographic” canon (ancient Russian literature) with the traditions of ethnographic descriptions of everyday life, which dates back to “Walking across Three Seas” by Afanasy Nikitin. The memoirist, as a rule, records the past selectively (this is due not only to the conscious desire of the author to highlight some events, obscuring others, but also to the specifics of human memory as such). V. Ivanov was no exception, for him of primary nature was the opinion taken from the point of view of the interests of science.

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