“It Would Be a Book…”: Memoirs of V.S. Veselovskiy “The Problems of Our Life”

Abstract. The review considers the publication of V.S. Veselovskiy’s memoirs (1900– 1977). He was a Soviet chemist, a mining expert, the son of an outstanding historian and archeographer S.B. Veselovskiy (1876–1952). There are traced three basic thematic lines on the pages of both volumes: 1) about his own life and scientific career, 2) family and close people, 3) socially significant events both in the Soviet Union and abroad. One of the volumes’ features is the embedding of sources of personal origin. At the same time, there are some diary fragments of V.S. Veselovskiy and his correspondence with close people. The interweaving of different sources in one text creates a difficulty in the species classification of the published source, but taking into account the purpose of creating “Problems of our life”, formulated by V.S. Veselovskiy, the more appropriate designation for the published edition is “memoirs – contemporary history”. Another feature is the integrity because the author sought to cover the most important events throughout his life, from early childhood to 1977. Finally, there were indicated the scientific directions (history of science and intellectual history) for which the book “Problems of our life” is of great interest.

Keywords: archeography, publication, reminiscences, “memoirs – contemporary history”, V.S. Veselovskiy, S.B. Veselovskiy.