https://doi.org/10.31261/pr.18631
The article examines the phenomenon of creating retrospective patterns in the literature about the war of 1812. Both during and after the military campaign, an extremely heterogeneous literary and informational background was formed in genres, simultaneously performing the functions of propaganda, historical truth and comprehension, and subsequent interpretation. It was during this period that patriotic literature emerged, giving impetus to the subsequent formation of conservative patriots and Slavophiles. However, in this discord of journalism, memoirs, eyewitness accounts and high literature, there are common motifs formed on the basis of retrospective knowledge (or the phenomenon hindsight bias, wisdom of hindsight). Various combinations of retrospective motifs form patterns — large images that predetermine the interpretation of events. One of such patterns is the victory pattern, formed in retrospect long before the Napoleonic Wars. This pattern creates the idea of the invincibility of the Russian army and considers obvious (Austerlitz 1805, Friedland 1807) and non-obvious (Borodino 1812) defeats or battles that did not achieve results in the aspect of victory and glory, and losses in the aspect of sacred sacrifice. Due to the dominance of the victory pattern, the coverage of the Patriotic War of 1812 diverges from the real state of affairs, when the existence of the Russian state was threatened
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No. 3 (191) (2025)
Published: 2025-09-21
10.31261/pr
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Język Polski
Русский
English