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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 20^th 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.