2020 Vol. 11 №2

This article deals with Andrey Bolotov’s official employment status during his time in Königsberg (April 1758 — March 1762). The work considers the historiographic tradition originating from Bolotov’s memoirs, the Königsberg pages of which were written more than 30 years after the events described. Bolotov’s memoirs are compared with his correspondence of the time and the archival materials of the Russian administration of East Prussia during the Seven Years’ War. It is concluded that Bolotov’s status was ambivalent. Although serving as a translator at the governor’s office, he never had an official rank. The study makes it possi­ble to clarify the role that Bolotov had in the local Russian administration as well as to under­stand his attitude to service in that difficult period for the Russian nobility.

Although the genre status of the memoirs of the Russian writer Andrei T. Bolotov has been repeatedly raised in the literature, it has never merited a separate study. This article analyses the structure of Bolotov’s memoirs in terms of their genre peculiarity. Text analysis shows that, when writing his memoirs, Bolotov used techniques borrowed from across various genres with which he was well acquainted. Those were the novel, the epistolary genre, the travelogue, the historical essay, etc. In the broad context of Bolotov’s works, the article shows that all those elements were not combined mechanically. A well-read and stylistically sensi­tive author, he was guided by an intuitive sense of appropriateness of each technique depend­ing on the object of description and thus achieved a genuine synthesis of genres. Finally, it is concluded that this intuition and a clear understanding that his task was a thorough descrip­tion of his life as a record for posterity translated in the literary finesse of Bolotov’s texts and their appeal to the reader.

The history of the creation of Andrei T. Bolotov’s memoirs has been little studied. In par­ticular, the stages of his work on this text are not entirely clear. This article is an attempt to shed light on one aspect of this problem. Bolotov’s personal fund (No. 349) in the Archives and manuscripts section of the State Historical Museum contain a manuscript of Bolotov’s memoirs entitled “Part 2”. It differs significantly in its essential characteristics (paper, de­sign, size, composition, title, division into sections, etc.) from most manuscripts of Bolotov’s memoirs. The study presents a textual analysis of this manuscript and compares it with the text of memoirs published by Mikhail Semevsky, — the most complete printed edition of The Life and Adventures of Andrei Bolotov. The stages of Bolotov’s work on the manuscript are considered; a comparative analysis of lexical units, stylistic preferences, and the content of the manuscript is carried out. The results obtained suggest that the undated manuscript is the earliest version of the memoirs, supposedly written in the late 1770s.