History/Memory: “Difficult” Dilemma

Abstract

The author attempts to analyze the problem of the correlation of history and memory. There were
analyzed three models of the solution of this problem, presented in the modern French social and
philosophical thought, and caused a huge public resonance – the theory of the collective memory
of M. Halbwachs, the concept of “places of memory” of Pierre Nora and the hermeneutics of the
history of P. Ricœur. The author shows that the solution of the problem is possible at the intersection
of two lines of research – philosophical-epistemological and practical-political. At the same time,
maintenance of the gap between history and memory leads to a depletion of history and opens
up opportunities for manipulating with memory. At the same time, memory can be inscribed in
an interpretative perspective open to the future, become a subject of collective capturing, but not
simply an element of museography, divorced from the present. For a normally functioning society,
the problem is not to divorce history and memory, having carefully delineating their sphere, but to
resolve the issue of how to link history, memory and oblivion.