In the context of the revival of the problematic field of document science, it is important to update theoretical reflections on a number of issues that may seem to some to have been resolved long ago, and at the same time to encourage research in the field of Ukrainian historical documentary studies. At this point, I would like to draw attention to the phenomenology of narrative in the Ukrainian documentary tradition. It is generally accepted that modern business (or office) practice naturally tends to automate, and thus to stencilise content and stylistic form, and this is a natural vector of its development; narrative texts, on the other hand, are a space for free creative imagination and stylistic experimentation.
As for literary texts, this is not entirely true. Medieval authors tried not to express their authorial individuality, using the so-called "centon-paraphrase" method of narrative construction [4]. They copied the "high style" formed by Byzantine rhetoric with its "weaving of words", relying on the paradigmatic "canons of ideal description" in depicting realities. Therefore, chronicle annals, written for hundreds of years by dozens of chroniclers, look like a stylistically homogeneous continuous text, the "embroidery" of which into individual author's editions was a great challenge even for a textual scholar such as Alexei Shakhmatov [14]. In the modern era, the USSR gradually developed a system of a unified Soviet style, which was embodied equally in both scientific literature and fiction ("socialist realism").
And even today, the so-called "professional" standards of scientific writing provide little room not only for stylistic expression but also for free structuring of one's own texts.
The tendency towards linguistic and stylistic unification of documents in the business sphere is a trend that has been shaped by various factors related to culture, politics, ideology, and a kind of "entelechy" in the evolution of documentation. As the works of Oleh Kupchynskyi and other diplomats show, the narrative clause in the early acts ("charters") of Ancient Rus was initially quite poor (or even non-existent). However, it gradually appeared and grew due to the detailing of everyday stories, as the documents were differentiated by type [8]. Oleksandr Lappo-Danylevskyi explained the formulaic instability and linguistic and stylistic unification of Old Russian charters by the fact that they were not quite acts in the modern sense: they recorded the fact of the transaction in the memory of the participants rather than confirming it in the legal plane [9]. Hence the archaic tradition of accompanying written records with a ritual (for example, publicly beating or mutilating a child, who was supposed to remember the moral and physical trauma inflicted under certain circumstances by specific people and witness the agreement many years later).
In ancient times, the history of national documentation did not distinguish between legal acts and private documents at all: only the word of the prince mattered, and the form of expression of his will was not important. For example, from the fourteenth century we have many charters of protection of Galician-Volynian princes issued to merchants for free trade, which had the form of an ordinary private letter [8, p.200-201]. And international agreements could look like friendly correspondence between friends (such as a letter to the Master of the Teutonic Order from the Galician princes Andriy and Lev in 1316), although it was sealed with the necessary means of certification [8, p.145].
Particularly interesting and detailed is the narrative clause of the documents of the Ukrainian office work of the sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth centuries, which functioned in the field of Lithuanian and Polish law, reflecting the everyday life of people (especially such types as complaints, testaments, lawsuits, confessions, investigative cases, court decrees, donation records, etc. Narrative diversity is also inherent in business records of a later period - the period of the Liberation War and the Hetmanate. Suffice it to look at the cunning rhetorical strategies of Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky in his diplomatic correspondence with potential allies and universals to the people: with a vivid appeal to biblical and apocalyptic topoi and the image of the last war - Armageddon, into which the war with the Poles could have escalated. Hetman's universals and letters to monarchs look like religious and journalistic texts in terms of their stylistic features [6].
The language of the documents of Ukrainian hetmans was a clerical synthesis of Polish, Church Slavonic, and even sometimes medieval Latin. And in the business documents of the Hetmanate of the eighteenth century, researchers note the organic interweaving of vernacular elements with bookish clericalisms, especially in the narrative clauses of forensic documents that described the everyday circumstances of cases: "lesson term", "decree term", "measure of justice", "insidious falsity", "punishment to be subjected to", "the case was tried before the court", "in this way", "came for guilt", "justly", "filed by staff", "to present documents" (yes, the term "documents" was used in the Ukrainian office work of the eighteenth century! ), "by natural law", "asked for incessantly", "for public money", "from those respects we give him the village", "to obstruct", etc. [5, p.161-162; 2, p.124, 127] By the way, the modern Ukrainian literary language had a chance to emerge not from the peasant dialects of the nineteenth century, but from the clerical (business) language of Cossack Ukraine of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries [7]. However, this did not happen, which has given rise to the current problem of cultural continuity / discontinuity between ancient and modern Ukraine [11, p.166-185].
The nineteenth-century office work, despite the well-known reforms of Emperors Peter I and Alexander I, was far from modern standards of unification. According to Halyna Orlova, "...correspondence between authorities was conducted in the form of personal letters, private statements were used to justify administrative actions (at the same time, there were no developed legislative schemes of legitimation, as well as administrative formulas). And circulars, reports and orders, wherever and by whomever they are sent, are filled with colourful and fascinating stories. All this finally convinces us of the clerical genealogy of the Russian literary language... And it also shows that "paper" lacks one of the basic properties of a document - the use of the resource of typification and schematisation to organise social reality" (our translation - S.S., K.P.) [10]. The space of the imperial bureaucracy functioned as an amorphous field of precedents that were arbitrarily and thoroughly set out in the narrative part of a business document without any signs of stenciling. The most standardised formulas of politeness (addressing, use of ranks and titles, correct addressing) between participants of business communication, who were placed by the "Table of Ranks" at different levels of the official hierarchy, were the most common.
The twentieth century was the century of ideological states. According to Roland Barthes, "political writing" is not characterised by stylistic neutrality: "a certain political society" forces one to express oneself in accordance with the prescriptions of those who hold power [1]. This applies not only to literature but also to business documents. The administrative, organisational, reporting, and protocol documents of the Soviet system were supposed to be standard and dry in content, as the field of documentation was covered by a wave of continuous standardisation from the 1950s-60s. However, the record-keeping practice of the communist era demonstrated somewhat different realities. The documents of Soviet office work, even the protocols that Andrea Graziosi urged not to trust [3], mastered literary tropes, using a solemnly exalted quasi-revolutionary style, pathetics, metaphors, metonymy, irony, "Aesop's language", hints-cryptograms, direct and hidden biblical quotations and allusions, of course, which had an understandable specificity under the influence of the dominant political discourse.
The language of this discourse (with its idealisation of conflict, radicalism, and violence) becomes the language of all texts, from literary to strictly business. The regularity here is as follows: the closer the society is to the event of its revolutionary reformatting, the more noticeable is the presence of political vocabulary in the forms of documents that, by their functional and species characteristics, should be stylistically neutral. It is worth mentioning at least the famous "Stalinist style" of party directives with a list of pejorative metaphors that were copied at all levels of the administrative vertical (with "pests", "scoundrels", "Trotskyists" and "enemies of the people" whom the "working people" always demanded to be shot) [12].
In such realities, a researcher of business records should take into account several layers of censorship. Andrea Graziosi divided Soviet-era protocols into three groups according to the level of censorship: drafts (they reflect the more or less true atmosphere of the meeting, but they are rarely preserved), self-censored by the author (both common sense and the instinct for self-preservation work here, which forced him to reduce the narrative part of the protocol to a minimum of key formulas), and censored at the stage of publication (with completely diluted content) [3]. This "building" structures different types of business documents with its logic, regardless of the form of political regime and the level of democratic freedoms.
In addition, politicised reality forces business document drafters to violate the principle of linguistic neutrality, add emotionality to the style, use the "party" thesaurus of ruling groups, change grammatical rules ad hoc, feminise familiar names of realities in line with global left-liberal trends, etc. "It is evident," wrote Barth, "that every political regime has its own writing, whose history is yet to be written" [1]. All of this prompts reflection on the correlation between the socio-political system and the form and stylistic specifics of business documentation, which paves the way for promising and interesting documentary studies. The lexico-grammatical and content analysis of business narratives from different periods of our history is of undoubted interest, given the factor of ideologisation and politicisation of business vocabulary, the presence of political clichés and clichés, formulas for expressing loyalty to dominant political factors, categories of self-identification, "otherness", etc.
Література
1. Барт Р. Нулевая степень письма. М., 2008. 434 с.
2. Бутич І. Універсали Івана Мазепи. К., 2002. 780 с.
3. Грациози А. Новые архивные документы советской эпохи: источниковедческая критика // Отечественные записки. 2008. №4 (43). С.253-275.
4. Данилевский И. Повесть временных лет. Герменевтические основы источниковедения летописных текстов. М., 2004. 370 с.
5. Ділова документація Гетьманщини ХVIII ст. / Упор. В. Й. Горобець. К., 1993. 392 с.
6. Документи Богдана Хмельницького (1648-1657) / Упор.: І. Крип’якевич, І. Бутич. К., 1961. 740 с.
7. Ісаєвич Я. Мовний код культури // Історія української культури. Т. 2: Українська культура XIII – першої половини XVII століть. К., 2001. С.156-169.
8. Купчинський О.А. Акти та документи Галицько-Волинського князівства ХІІІ – першої половини ХIV століть. Дослідження. Тексти. Л., 2004. 1285 с.
9. Лаппо-Данилевский А.С. Очерк русской дипломатики частных актов. СПб., 2007. 285 с.
10. Орлова Г. Официальный документ: удостоверение и фальсификация власти // Статус документа. Окончательная бумажка или отчужденное свидетельство?: [электронный ресурс]: URL: https://igiti.hse.ru/Editions/Document.
11. Савченко С.В. Проблема функціонування давньоруської спадщини в українській культурі ХVІІ-ХІХ ст.: вступні міркування // Княжа доба. Історія і культура. Вип.1. Львів, 2007. С.166-185.
12. Свідчення з минувшини. Мовою документів. Д., 2001. 320 с.
13. Українське повсякдення ранньомодерної доби. Збірник документів. Вип. 1. Волинь ХVІ ст. / Під ред. І. Ворончук. 2014. 776 с.
14. Шахматов А.А. Разыскания о русских летописях. М., 2001. 375 с.
References
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