Memorization, forgetting and oblivion of documentary memory

In the article, the author continues to analyze the features of documentary historical memory as one of the types of historical memory. The paper considers three aspects related to the historical memory formation (as an arbitrary and involuntary memorization of what is happening in the process of regulation with the help of a reality document), to forgetting and oblivion of documentary memory.
The article attempts to identify the determinants affecting the completeness and the reliability accuracy of the document’s memorization of what is happening, connected with the mental and social characteristics of its author, as well as other motives that guide him when creating a document, regardless of whether the latter belongs to a particular class of records. Thus it explains the issues related to the reliability of documentary evidence of documentary historical memory.
The author considers the transformation of a document into a documentary historical source and in this regard tries to explain how, in the process of such transformation, on the one hand, there is a final forgetting of a part of documentary memory in general, and on the other – a temporary forgetting of documentary historical memory.
Special attention is paid in the article to the issue of forgetting documentary historical memory as a phenomenon associated with its irreparable loss under the influence of various force majeure circumstances and in cases of deliberate liquidation. Meanwhile, the author scrutinizes, for the first time, the interpretation of oblivion that developed in Russian archival practice, and evaluates the decisive break with that practice – the break implemented through the legislation of Catherine II.

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