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Abstract:

The article traces the stages of practical archival work of the scholar-philologist on a specific example, i. e., the preparation for publication of the Memoirs by N.G. Chulkova (1874–1961), the wife of G.I. Chulkov (1879–1939), the symbolist writer and literary figure of the Silver age and 1920–1930s. Memoirs were written in the USSR during the 1940s–1950s and are presented in 4 typewritten copies known today, stored in 4 different archives in Moscow and St. Petersburg. The author’s will regarding the legitimacy of a particular copy is unknown to us. Therefore, the study and comparison of these 4 archival documents first becomes the basis for establishing the source text of the publication, and then the formation of its main text. The solution of this textual problem was complicated by the loss of one of the 4 known copies of N.G. Chulkova’s Memoirs from the archive of the A.A. Blok Museum-apartment in Saint Petersburg. The miraculous return of this typewriting in 2018 largely changed the formation of the forthcoming text of the ego-document. The article presents a fragment of Chulkova’s unpublished memoirs, dedicated to the communication between the Chulkovs and Anna Akhmatova. Variants of the memories by N.G. Chulkova are stored in the Russian State Library, the Institute of Russian Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences, V.I. Dal Museum of history of Russian literature, and A.A. Blok’s Museum-apartment in St. Petersburg.

Keywords: N.G. Chulkova, G.I. Chulkov, Anna Akhmatova, Memoirs, archival document, autograph, main text.