Socialist writer doctor as narrative instances in Dmitry Aksharumov’s
memoirs

The article is devoted to preliminary results of investigation of narrative
organization of Dmitry Dmitrievich Aksharumov’es memoirs (in the soviet
variants “Notes of Petrashevets”). The narrative is considered in the article
as a semiotic proection of verbal behavior.
For the contemporaries of Akhsharumov, who read his memoirs in the year
1905 turning the year for the country, the description of the solitary confinement
of the hero could play special significance. It is hardly an exaggeration to say
that nobody except Akhsharumov, none of the Petrashevists, or those who are
in the case of M. V. Butashivch-Petrashevsky, did not describe this episode
in detail.
In the article the full entire text of memories is considered for the first time,
and not individual chapters, as was done in the previous tradition.
As a medical doctor, an enthusiastic person hygiene and psychology researcher
joins Akhsharumov in his narrative several significant instances:
1) socialist; 2) writer 3) doctor. The observations presented in the summary table,
created by analogy with the "cells" F. Lejeune table.
The first role – a socialist and a republican – involves criticizing the social
ideas of the 1840s, exposing imperial power and its terror, representing oneself as a victim. It seems interesting that the socialist presents himself in the diegetic
narrative as a victim of the imperial regime and power. At the same time, this
level is accumulated intertext from the fiction (crime novels and other) to memoirs
of oppositionist. The real experience is inextricably linked with the literary
(from the "Count of Monte Cristo" A. Duma to “The Last Day of the Man Sentenced
to Death” V. Hugo).
The second role is actualized by the exegetical level connecting the plan of
the memory and the writing plan, the storytelling event and the event being told.
This level is associated with the so-called therapy of writing. Moving away from
the memory, hiding behind the border of the created text, the writer creates
a therapeutic distance.
The final role – the role of the doctor and scientist – turns the object and subject
of the narrative into an object of observation. The past is not only appropriated
by this integration, but also becomes an inseparable part of social experience,
which is interpreted within medical discourse. Actually stopping at the
time of his solitary confinement, reproducing the smallest episodes associated
with this time, Akhsharumov creates a series of photographs of his psychological
state, captures the existence of the prisoner in the most complex perspectives
and states, shows the prisoner\s consciousness as a complex dynamic phenomenon
existing in a constant swing between sleep and reality. This experience
could be perceived not only by journalistic and memoirs, but also by fiction
literature.
Combining three narrative instances in his memoirs Akhsharumov creates
synthetic text which, on the one hand, reflecting the literary tradition, while at
the same time opens up human existence, caught in solitary confinement.