Information about the authors:
Svetlana N. Morozova
Svetlana N. Morozova, PhD in Philology, Senior Lecturer, Branch of the Military Academy of Logistics named after General of the Army A.V. Khrulev, Military town 1, 440005 Penza, Russia.
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0686-5614
E-mail:
Ekaterina V. Kuznetsova
Ekaterina V. Kuznetsova (Moscow, Russia), PhD in Philology, Research Fellow, A.M. Gorky Institute of World literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Povarskaya 25 а, 121069 Moscow, Russia.
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6045-2162
E-mail:
Abstract:
The article is devoted to the analysis of the peculiarities of K.I. Chukovsky’s reception of O. Wilde’s works. It is noted that the attitude to the English writer was adjusted by the critic and evolved throughout his literary activity and was largely determined by the changing historical and cultural context in Russia. This trend can be traced both in the general tone of the writer’s critical works dedicated to Wilde, as well as in Chukovsky’s individual diary entries and his epistolary. In the course of the study, it was found that Chukovsky’s early reception of Wilde is characterized by harsh criticism and the rejection of his eccentric tendencies, which later in the 1960s Chukovsky perceived as a way to fight Puritan morality of the bourgeois. In addition, it was Chukovsky who actively created the image of “suffering Wilde” during the 1910s, which became a part of the “Russian” Wilde myth. It was determined that the research of foreign authors and one of the letters of M. Gorky contributed to the change in the attitude of Chukovsky to Wilde.