The Past Is To Be New

Abstract. The article is supposing as a programme Manifesto of the journal team. The journal title “Novoe Proshloe/The New Past” has been explaining by means of contemporary issue s of historical memory studies and in more wider humanities context. The maim idea of the project is to consider history as not a established and prescribed collection of a facts but rather as a result of a historian activity which to be produced in an academic think-tank. By the second half of the twentieth century history as a academic discipline has been influenced by other humanities that resulted in a few “turns” such as linguistic, pragmatic, epistemological etc., and finally history lost its monopoly to explain the past. The authors argue that digital media, Mass-culture and other information actors attract more wider audience in the process of producing the past. The additional factor of the contemporary historical situation is “commemorative management” which is considering by the authors as an important element of history-writing, especially in Russian context. The micro-level of new historical situation, as it considered by the authors, is connected with tradition of Rostov school of historical studies which emphasises rather practices of communication between the past and historian that the past as such. All together caused the situation where the past is always “the new past”. At the same time the combination of micro- and macro factors causes the new challenges for contemporary historical situation, and the magazine’ Editorial Council invites academics from wide humanities to produce all kind responses for that challenges.

Keywords: the past, history-writing, memory studies, collective memory, commemorative management, contemporary humanities, interdisciplinary.