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Abstract:

The study presents a reconstruction of the circle of Russian and European writers in the “Non-War Diary. 1914–1916” (1917) of D.S. Merezhkovsky. This is an example of a productive interaction between textual criticism, literary history and poetics. It is facilitated by the use of both printed, scattered in pre-revolutionary periodicals (newspapers and magazines of the First World War), and handwritten (RO IRLI, RGALI) sources. Turning to this research “plot” is a new step in solving not only applied (scientific-editional), but also fundamental (analytical) problems. The immanent movement into the “archeology” of individual articles concretizes the historical context of the entire collection, complements the precedent ones for D.S. Merezhkovsky literary names and expands our understanding of the “fluctuations” that took place in the attitude of the author to his predecessors and contemporaries. The formal reason for writing most of the articles in the “Non-War Diary. 1914–1916” is a literary event or memorable date. The true stimulus for the author’s reflections is social and political events. The discussions about military and pre-revolutionary everyday life on the pages of the collection are basically literary-centric. A fullfledged analysis of this supertextual unity is impossible without understanding the role of the names of Russian and European writers included in it, who have become an integral part of the intellectual landscape of the crisis era.