In XX century «memory» became a point of special reflection and investigation. This article examines the concept of memory and its implications in culture of early XX century. It reviews the use of this term in the most important modernist texts and questions the functions of memory both in discourse and practices. The 1st World War gave rise to the modernist doubt in utopian ideals of Enlightenment Project and indicated the break with rationalism. This turn was closely engaged with new cultural understandings of memory. War gave rise to doubt in validity of memory (idea on which there were based main norms and realizations of truth and verification in different situation, in everyday life and theoretical framework, in both bureaucratic and private practices). Many authors came to one paradoxical conclusion: «memory» is oblivion, memory not recalls but deforms past, it substitutes for reality, memory deprives people of time and free will. The concept of «memory» was converged in XX century with the problem of temporality and people identity. This article analyzes how «memory» was entangled with new cultural practices.

This paper pursues a study devoted to «memory», its representations and cultural function in inter- and past-war periods. At that time the phenomenological program enjoyed wide popularity among a new generation of intellectuals started the «linguistic turn». One important consequence of this intellectual movement was the powerful criticism of the linguistic nature of memory. In the center of criticism were the linguistic mechanisms that deform the representations of current events, pack the «reality» in cultural accepted patterns and clichés, bended to social pressure. The intellectual tradition returned to lost since antiquity discussion of social nature of «memory» and social function of reminiscences. There was one main idea: social experience kept in a language transforms individual experience, alienates and appropriates individual impressions, disciplines and subdues to general social rules, sets to see imagined objects lacking in reality and to be oblivious of the present. This representation of «memory» became very popular. The criticism of social conformity became entangled in culture with antiwar protest and resistance movement. A new generation of intellectuals set the task to disclose memory-occupier and to show utopian «new world» — world in which memory would lose its social function.