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Abstract: The article is devoted to the history of the creation and literary life of M. Gorky’s article “To the Worker and Peasant Correspondents about how I Learned to Write”. The textological analysis of the literary-critical article has made it possible to see the complex process of the writer's work on the text. The methodology of academic source studies has allowed identifying practically all archival and publisher sources, which, in turn, has allowed the author to see all the nuances of the process of the text creation. The method of modern text analysis in combination with the historico-biographical method has helped determine the role of the text in the historico-literary process of 1928–1934. The critical reviews by V. Shklovsky and A. Chistyakov allowed the author of the article to discern the originality of the text, which is based on the writer’s judgment about his own writing experience and only then a judgment about literature as a whole. The thematic richness of Gorky’s article under analysis has contributed to the urgent conclusion about the research topic as one of the most important strategic tasks of the literary process study of the twentieth century. This, to a large extent, is facilitated by its appeal to beginner writers. The results presented in this article can be used for the third series of the Complete Works of Gorky: Journalistic and literary-critical articles, as well as for further research in the field of textology and source studies.

About the author(s) :

Olga V. Bystrova
A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Moscow, Russia)
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1542-2516

 

Acknowledgements: The research has been carried out at the Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences with financial support of the Russian Science Foundation grant No. 23-28-01158 “Maxim Gorky and the Low Level Literary Movement” https://rscf.ru/project/23-28-01158.

 

Publication Timeline:

Date of receipt: 11.07.2024; date of publication: 30.10.2024

References:

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