I was never able to choose between history and fiction. All in my life, was just swinging between these two topics. When I was a child, I loved literature and history classes in the school, but for a long-long time I thought I have to choose between them.
Now I know, that these two are not that far from each other. Actually, there is a point, when history and fiction meet. And it’s not just simple the historical fiction.
Just think about it! Everything we know about the past, especially, the time before photograph and film, is heavily shaped by own imagination. We have never experimented past centuries, only imagined what it might have been.
In a way, history is always the present’s imagination about the past. Not only, when it comes to the genre historical fiction, but also in cases of nonfictional history books.
Natalie Zemon Davis writes in the Introduction of her famous book, The Return of Martin Guerre:
What I offer you here is in part my invention, but held tightly in check by the voices of the past.
What she refers to, is the general sentiment, that even historians have to use their imagination to put a story from the past together. It is just simply how storytelling (both fictional and non-fictional) works. (Even it is a bit strange to write down the phrase “non-fictional” in this particular context.)
When I created this little official website of mine I was thinking a lot about a fitting name for a blog, which could fairly include both my interest in history and in fiction. At the end, it turned out, that the most simple idea could be the winning one.
Thus, History and fiction is the name of my little online project where I intend to write about this two topics. (Meanwhile in “My 21st century” project, obviously, I would write more about topic related to the time we are living. )