Memoirs of historians at the turning point of history: personal and professional self-identity

In 1990s-2010s, at the times of great changes in historic reality and historical studies, some of the prominent Rus-sian historians who belonged to different generations published their memoirs. This “memorial burst” could be in-terpreted as an experience of self-understanding of the scientific community. The memoirs of historians combine the features of historical source, historiographic paper and literary artifact; they contain valuable information on the communicative practices, corporate ethos of the scientific community, and strategies of personal behavior of scholars when they faced the historic challenges. We can interpret this complex of memoirs as one of the manifestations of the “anthropologic turn” in historiography: the turn towards studying “everyday life” of scholars. The devotion to the norms of professional ethics is often evaluated as an existential choice of historian in the context of “catastrophic Russian historicism”.