NARRATIVE TOLERANCE IN THE FRAMEWORK OF CONCEPTUAL TOOLS OF THE NARRATIVE THEORY OF HISTORICAL KNOWLEDGE

Abstract

The article is devoted to the elaboration of the concept of narrative tolerance as a conceptual and methodological tool for processing the past, based on such conceptual grounds of the narrative theory of historical knowledge as constructivism, methodological openness, instrumentalist approach to the understanding of historical narrative, revisionism and perspectivism. Narrative tolerance is proposed to be understood as a refusal to impose one’s historical narrative on others (in accordance with the principle that “history is written by the victors”), as well as the possibility of including the voices of different historical agents in the narrative and taking into account different points of view without reducing the overall conclusions of the investigation to a “common denominator”, especially
in situations with long-term historical conflicts. It is pointed out that the historical past — the historical reality as we know it through historical works — is always, to a large extent, an “augmented reality” to the real past. The components that a historian “adds” to the
real past, creating the historical past in the process of researching, explaining and interpreting the available material, include theories, methodologies, and conceptual apparatus that are modern and regularly updated. The main mechanism for creating and changing the historical past as an augmented reality is the historical narrative. Thus, a set of historical narratives can be viewed as a way and mechanism of narrative engineering, a permanent process of re-description and re-evaluation of existing historical knowledge in the light of new data or theoretical and methodological approaches within the contemporary humanities.