Documentary literature written by earth scientists (discursive aspects of the profession)

The purpose of the article is to assess the cultural identification value of documentary literature written by earth scientists who act as amateur biographers and memoirists. One of the tasks is to analyze the literary forms that embody the professional identification of geologists in the context of the problem of genre formation in documentary literature. The scientists realize their creative potential as amateur authors in the works written for commemorative purposes on the basis of real-life plots. The paper presents the comparative analysis of two scientists’ biographies written by their counterparts: the life chronicle of I. V. Belkov written by his wife and colleague I. D. Batieva and the autobiographical novel co-written by V. Z. Negrutsa and dedicated to his deceased wife T. Ya. Negrutsa. The authors and heroes of both books are geologists - doctors of sciences who worked at the Kola Science Centre of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Both books are characterized by the same type of relation between textual and extra-textual reality as a specific feature of documentary literature. The analysis is based on the ideas that genres are identified according to their common properties of a supra-genre character, which create stable or situational combinations and determine the similarity and diversity of texts. Professional identification is carried out on the basis of principles of documentation, memoirism, historicism, biographism, autobiographism, and commemorative attitude. These principles manifest themselves in different ways under the influence of the author’s motivation, genre form, and writing competence. The intersection of specific and genre features in different proportions and combinations creates unique examples of factual literature that are part of the literary heritage of scientific community. From the socio-anthropological perspective, it is important that these works reveal both stable and varying cultural models of geologists.