ORDINARY LIFE OF DECEMBRISTS BANISHED TO WESTERN SIBERIA (FOLLOWING RECOLLECTIONS, ESSAYS AND MEMOIRS)
The article presents the result of studying the recollections, essays and memoirs of the Decembrists and those who came into contact with them in everyday life, in different periods of their stay in exile in the cities and settlements of Western Siberia. The focus is on the “ordinary life” of Decembrists and their families in the conditions of the need to build relations with local authorities, with the “alien” social environment. By the term “ordinary life” we mean not only the conditions of everyday life of the Decembrists in exile, but most of all their internal perception of forced otherness, their creative desire to reconstruct their lost world in the new society. Self-reflection of the exiles was realized in cer- tain actions aimed at changing life in accordance with their moral ideals, values and individual abilities. The article distinguishes the concepts of “society” and “social environment”. The social environment is a zone of the nearest action of a person, it includes the immediate environment of the person, changed by the actions and deeds of the person himself. The society in which Decembrists found themselves was radically different from the social environment and society in which they had lived before the December uprising and exile. Therefore, we use the terms “alien” society and “otherness”. One of the key concepts in the article is the “image of the Decembrist”, introduced in accordance with the principles of modern ima- gology and based on the work by Y. M. Lotman “Ordinary life of a Decembrist”. This “image”, for the most part, is collective, and includes both scientific and ordinary views, collective and individual ideas, evaluative judgments about personified symbols, about Decembrism as a socio-political and socio-cultural phenomenon. As an example, the article considers the image of I. D. Yakushkin presented in his memoirs.