Research project
Catalogue of Oral Stories about the Occupation and the Holocaust
The project aims to complete and publish a catalogue of oral narratives about the occupation and the Holocaust.
For several years, project authors have been recording oral stories about the German occupation and the Holocaust. They used to talk to both those who eyewitnessed them, “generation of postmemory” and the young people. They also have noticed that these stories, especially collected from the youth, contain several common plots, clishes, and narrative structures. Passing around from one narrator to another, the stories inevitably become typical. They also absorb structures of traditional folk tales and media-narratives. As in traditional folklore, narrative models are distributed unevenly: some stories are widely present in specific regions, others in small towns or large cities.
The project aims to complete and publish a catalogue of oral narratives about the occupation and the Holocaust. Project authors already have corpus of texts recorded in Russia in 2020-2023 and in Russia, Moldova and Belarus in the 2000s. To complete the catalogue, they will collect texts from Belarusian archives of oral history and folklore and conduct some interviews. Then they will divide texts by thematic sections and plots. Each text will be provided with several “tags”, such as the ethnic self-identification of the narrator, his year of birth, place of recording, etc. The catalogue will become not only a systematized collection of texts, but also a research tool. With its help it will be possible to compare stories recorded in different regions, from people of different ages and different ethnicities. The authors hope that the catalogue will be useful to memory researchers, oral history specialists, folklorists, psychologists and cultural scientists.
The project leader is Dr. Anna Kirziuk, Senior Research Fellow at the Laboratory of Theoretical Folkloristics, Russian Presidential Academy of Public Administration (RANEPA, Moscow).
Project participants:
Sergey Belyanin, Research Fellow at the Laboratory of Theoretical Folkloristics, Russian Presidential Academy of Public Administration (RANEPA, Moscow).
Ekaterina Zakrevskaya, Junior Research Fellow in the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Russian
Academy of Sciences (Moscow).
The project is carried out with the financial support of Alexander Klyachin.
The project aims to complete and publish a catalogue of oral narratives about the occupation and the Holocaust. Project authors already have corpus of texts recorded in Russia in 2020-2023 and in Russia, Moldova and Belarus in the 2000s. To complete the catalogue, they will collect texts from Belarusian archives of oral history and folklore and conduct some interviews. Then they will divide texts by thematic sections and plots. Each text will be provided with several “tags”, such as the ethnic self-identification of the narrator, his year of birth, place of recording, etc. The catalogue will become not only a systematized collection of texts, but also a research tool. With its help it will be possible to compare stories recorded in different regions, from people of different ages and different ethnicities. The authors hope that the catalogue will be useful to memory researchers, oral history specialists, folklorists, psychologists and cultural scientists.
The project leader is Dr. Anna Kirziuk, Senior Research Fellow at the Laboratory of Theoretical Folkloristics, Russian Presidential Academy of Public Administration (RANEPA, Moscow).
Project participants:
Sergey Belyanin, Research Fellow at the Laboratory of Theoretical Folkloristics, Russian Presidential Academy of Public Administration (RANEPA, Moscow).
Ekaterina Zakrevskaya, Junior Research Fellow in the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Russian
Academy of Sciences (Moscow).
The project is carried out with the financial support of Alexander Klyachin.