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A.M. Gorky Institute
of World Literature
of the Russian Academy of Sciences

IWL RAS Publishing

A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature
of the Russian Academy of Sciences

 IWL RAS

Povarskaya 25a, 121069 Moscow, Russia

8-495-690-05-61

edition@imli.ru

iwl.ras.publishing@gmail.com

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Information about the author:

Olga V. Bystrova, PhD in Philology, Associate Professor, Senior Researcher, А.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of Russian Academy of Sciences, Povarskaya 25 а, 121069 Moscow, Russia.

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1542-2516

E-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Abstract:

The article is devoted to Maxim Gorky’s publishing project “Vsemirnaia Literatura.” The publishing house, established in 1918, became a kind of experiment that allowed to unite literary forces in the conditions of revolutionary and post-revolutionary devastation. The article analyzes Gorky’s agreements with the heads of state structures of the USSR, which allowed the publishing house to work on an autonomous basis in the early years of the Civil War. During the years of devastation and famine, “Vsemirnaia Literatura” offered readers a range of the best works of Western European and Eastern literature. For this work, the literary and scientific community of 1918–1921 developed the latest methods in the theory and practice of translation, which determined the literary translation practice of the entire Soviet era. The topic under study is strategically important for understanding the development of publishing prospects in the USSR. The article touches upon the issue of Gorky’s organizational activities aimed at rallying and saving the literary and scientific elite of the country. The sources of information on this topic are documents from A.M. Gorky Archive (IWL RAS, Moscow). Gorky’s letters and N. Neradovsky’s memoirs used as sources are being published for the first time. These documents provide additional, previously unknown material for the study of the Gorky’s project, and also allow us to reconstruct individual episodes of the writer’s biography from 1918 to 1921. The selected bibliography on the history of “Vsemirnaia Literatura” proposed as an appendix helps to understand the degree of study of this topic. All this together leads to the conclusion that the stated topic is one of the most promising in the study of the literary process of the 20th century. The study of the problem suggests the use of a set of methods of source analysis, while the sources are biographical, memoir, epistolary and other materials.

  • Keywords: M. Gorky, “Vsemirnaia Literatura,” Western Editorial Board, Eastern Editorial Board, Publishing House Catalog, Translation, Editing, State Publishing House, World Literature.

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