Title of the article:

“AND I ALSO WANT TO WORK, TO LEARN AND TO LIVE”: A LETTER OF A. SEVERNY TO M. GORKY

Author(s):

Anna V. Khroustaleva 

Information about the author/authors

Anna V. Khroustaleva — DSc in Philology, Senior Researcher, A. M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Povarskaya 25 a, 121069 Moscow, Russia.

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9015-2523
E-mail: olvimy21@gmail.com

Section

Philological sciences

Year

2022

Volume

Vol. 66

Pages

pp. 255–262

Received

May 18, 2022

Approved after reviewing

June 25, 2022

Date of publication

December 28, 2022

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.37816/2073-9567-2022-66-255-262

Index UDK

821.161.1.0

Index BBK

83.3(2Рос=Рус)6

Acknowledgements

This paper was prepared with financial support of the Russian Science Foundation, project № 20-18-00394 “Stenograph: Politics and literature. Digital archive of literary organizations”. 

Abstract

The paper discusses the correspondence of A. M. Gorky with a provincial forgotten writer Arkady Alexandrovich Vdovin (pseudonym Arkady Severny). Severny's letters to Gorky are not only the one of the few sources for Severny's biography, but also an important source of data for the yet-to-be-written history of the province's post-revolutionary literary life. They illustrate the mass literary movement of the 1920s and 1930s, and introduce new information about Gorky's informal interest in supporting the interest of aspiring authors in literary work. Gorky's correspondence with aspiring writers from the provinces enriches perceptions about the history of Soviet everyday life, characterizes the alignment of literary forces grouped around writers' unions, literary practices of local associations of proletarian writers, everyday behavior of their members. Severny is a writer who positioned himself as a member of the Moscow Association of Proletarian Writers. Little is known about his biography. The fact of his presumed residing in the Volga Region is retrieved according to some newspaper publications. They show that Severny repeatedly recited his poems in different corners of Saratov. His  autobiographical poem “About Myself” published on 26^th of the November, 1925 in “The Bolshevik Juveniles” demonstrates that he was taken into Komsomol and had a background of a factory worker. He accentuated his proletarian origin to get in touch with Gorky. In the early 1930s, Severny's letters to Gorky remained unanswered. The reason for this was Severny's attempt to sell Gorky's letters to him to the editors of the Leningrad magazine “Rezets”.

Keywords

A. Severny, Provincial Correspondents of Gorky, the History of Everyday Life.

References

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