Iryna Mahouskaja: How the story of a man fits in the history of the country?

Modern researchers of oral history are first of all interested in such subjects as memory and overcoming difficult situations.

In our country this niche is, basically, free; few organizations like the Belarusian Oral History Archive work on collecting and fixing oral materials.

During the last of the series of the Flying University lectures this year Iryna Mahouskaja, the candidate of historical science, told why the stories of human lives are interesting. “EuroBelarus” Information Service attended a lecture “Life as history or story of life: how to understand the past”.

Iryna Mahouskaja started her lecture with the seemingly obvious proposition: to narrate the story of life means to assume that life is history.

Towards the end of the 20^th century historical science witnessed a real Renascence of biographical research. For historians, interest to them is connected with the huge opportunities of this genre: it was an attempt to grasp the individual, the human dimension in the flow of eras.

Appeal to the biography as to the method of collecting socially significant information is a reflection of certain historical changes in the social life. Biographical method starts spreading in the 1920s in the United States and Poland. From these studies the so-called humanitarian factor emerged: if you do not take into account the particularities of different people’s mentality, you can not explain why they respond differently to one and the same phenomenon.

- The study of the entire course of human life lies in the center of biographical research, - says Irina Mahouskaja. – The peculiarity of the biographical method is that it covers methods of measurement and evaluation of historical evidence narrated from the point of view of those who lived this life.

At the same time the biographical research has its own requirements. First, it should give the overall perspective of the individual’s life. Secondly, it should take into account the interrelation between the story of individual life and society. And thirdly, it should make sense of interpreting activity of everyday actors.

According to the lecturer, the advantage of biographical study is that it can give scientists a perspective on the complexity of social reality, which is not represented in sociological theories.

The simple and at the same time a broad definition of the biography is “the story of a personal experience”. Two concepts are distinguished there: the personal narrative and the biographical interview.

Broadly speaking, the narrative is a text that describes the sequence of events. There can be several types of the biographical interview. For example, the leitmotif interview – when a researcher makes the questionnaire and the respondent answers the questions that are of his/her particular interest. However, the narrative interview has a certain advantage over it: during the narrative interview the respondent is asked to tell his/her life story in detail.

There are three rules of narration. The first one is the integrity and completeness. The second principle is concentration: since the narrator has a limited amount of time (s)he can stop only on those life events that (s)he finds the most important. And the third principle is specification, when the narrator has to specify and clarify the specific circumstances.

A person, who has a practice of public narrative, mostly uses the models that are familiar to him or her. And it is noticeable during the interview. For the majority of respondents the story of their lives is associated it with the genre of public speaking.

- It is something important that you can tell the others, - Irina Mahouskaja says. - And this is what raises doubts among narrators during the interview. People don’t think that their experience can be of interest to others, don’t consider it worthy of retelling – they are ordinary! From the perspective of informants life that can be told should be unique, while their own life is not unique.

According to Irina Mahouskaja, the laws of the official biography will somehow impose themselves outside the frames of official situations. The illusions of oral history in relation to the revolutionary "dismantling" of the official history started to collapse rapidly, as soon as it became clear, that the informant is largely influenced by "official" version. Besides, the truth of oral history is not always factual. When considering oral sources we can rather talk about values, attitudes, feelings, and beliefs.

- Back in Soviet society everyone had two different biographies. They differed, because people were always cautious as to what “mars” and what “doesn’t mar” the biography.

According to the researcher, the rhetoric of the private story and its public variant differ. Conversational language is clearly depicted as an element of privacy and is excluded from the public "report" about life. Thus, summed up the lecturer, whatever the person is telling, (s)he always narrates his/her viewpoint and narrates him-/herself.