Litovskaya M. A., Xu Ran The Place of Memory in P. P. Bazhov’s Literary Activity

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Litovskaya M. A., Xu Ran The Place of Memory in P. P. Bazhov’s Literary Activity

Maria A. Litovskaya
Doctor of Philological Sciences, Professor, Institute of History and Archaeology, Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Russia, Ekaterinburg)
ORCID: 0000-0002-3388
E-mail: marialiter@gmail.com

Xu Ran (徐冉)
Postgraduate Student, Ural Federal University (Russia, Ekaterinburg)
ORCID: 0009-0005-7097-9407
E-mail: xuran714@gmail.com

Download | Back to the Content № 3. 2025

UDC 821.161.1:94(470.5)
DOI: 10.58529/2782-6511-2025-4-3-94-111

ABSTRACT. Pavel Petrovich Bazhov (1878–1950) repeatedly spoke about memory as the most important source and tool of his creativity in interviews in the last years of his life. By collecting examples of local sayings (recheniya-pobaski) and including them in his texts, Bazhov preserved the memory of the Ural speech culture. Using historical documents, his own and others’ memories, he created historical “fables” about the disappearing way of life in the mining industry of the Urals, and then began to “restore folklore from memory” by recounting the stories of “factory elders” that he had heard as a child. Finally, drawing upon personal memories and materials from collective memory, he created an unfinished series of autobiographical texts and a series of original tales that formed “The Malakhit Box” collection, which was expanded throughout the author’s life. Taken together, texts of the various genres offer a version of the history of the Urals that is largely alternative to the state version and an image of the Urals both as of a “frontier” and as a “heartland.” P. P. Bazhov perceives himself as a unique subject of the communicative memory of the Ural mining workers, capable of reproducing their way of thinking, language, value system in written form. He uses his literary skills to transform the communicative memory of a social group into cultural memory — a system of symbols for the region — and to create an image of the Urals that can captivate his readers. The writer also strives to save from oblivion fragments of the history of a place that are not ready for artistic processing by discussing relevant topics in letters, speeches, and conversations, and disseminating them among contemporaries and descendants.

KEYWORDS: Russian literature of the 20th century, cultural geography, artistic historicism, image of the Urals, P. P. Bazhov, collective memory

For citation: Litovskaya M. A., Xu Ran. [The Place of Memory in P. P. Bazhov’s Literary Activity]. Istoriko-geograficheskiy zhurnal [Historical Geography Journal], 2025, vol. 4, no. 3, pp. 94–111. DOI: 10.58529/2782-6511-2025-4-3-94-111 (In Russian).

Received 16 September 2025
Accepted 11 November 2025

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