The Narrative as a Mnemonic Text (Based on “Children of War” Narratives)

The article is focuses on the consideration of "children of war" narratives as mnemonic texts united by a common theme and containing memories of the Great Patriotic War in Russia (1941- 1945). The interdisciplinary approach to the analysis of such texts makes it possible to describe the nature of representation of the war in the minds of its eyewitnesses, to trace its rethinking and changing nature of memories. The research material illustrates the distinctive features of the narrative as a mnemonic text, namely the retrospective nature of the narrative, structural and semantic heterogeneity of the texts, linguistic expression of the authenticity of the event series, the interaction of the narrator with the interviewer in the narration, temporal postponement of memories expressed in evaluative judgments, self-examination of the events, reflexion, as well as cognitive "symbiosis" of the past and present, expressed in the using of past and present tenses of verbs in a sentence. The article introduces the notion of mnemonic situation and describes its structure and types: situations of information presence, situations of information loss, situations of information absence and situations of information recovery. In the course of the research, we found examples of interaction of several types of mnemical situation in a sentence or a thematic fragment.