Between archive and memory: a researcher’s affective experience of working with historical documents

This article investigates the affective dimension of archival work, examining the role of emotions in the researcher’s interaction with archival documents and archival space. Drawing on affective and autoethnographic approaches, it analyses more than thirty years of the author’s professional experience in state and departmental archives of Kazakhstan, Russia, and Uzbekistan. The theoretical framework of the study integrates the concepts of affect, feeling, and emotion, the theory of affective economies and the “stickiness” of emotions to objects, the notions of archive fever and archival melancholy, the conceptualisation of the archive as an affective environment, and the principle of embodied knowledge. The study demonstrates that the emotional experience of archival work is shaped at the intersection of several registers: engagement with documents bearing witness to political repression and state violence; the interplay between personal and family memory and archival evidence; and the affective atmosphere produced by the organisation of the reading room and the professional culture of archivists. Particular attention is paid to the phenomenon of “deprivation affect”, a specific experience of the incompleteness of historical knowledge arising from the inaccessibility of classified or dispersed documents. Through concrete archival case studies, the article demonstrates that the researcher’s emotional response is not opposed to rational inquiry but is integrated into it, functioning as an epistemologically significant resource for historical interpretation. The article contributes to the conceptualisation of affective archivistics as a methodological stance that recognises emotional experience as an indispensable dimension of archival practice.