Две жизни, две судьбы: по страницам переписки Н.С. Ашукина и С.Н. Дурылина

Abstract

The article is the first publication of the correspondence between Nikolay Ashukin and Sergey Durylin, who were contemporaries. Being both from the same social medium they studied at the Archaeological Institute and began writing poetry in the 1910s. They started travelling around Russia using the same routes and seemed to have similar fates. But their intents were different from the very beginning: a religious search for Durylin, an “ethnographic” for Ashukin. Theу were drifted apart after the October Revolution and the Civil War. Durylin became a priest in 1920, then experienced arrests, exile, “internal emigration,” but did not give up his writing and educational activities. Ashukin, on the other hand, becoming a successful Soviet literature official lost himself in the petty publishing work as a compiler, introductory articles author, textual critic, bibliographer and text commentator and stopped writing poetry and prose in fact. All evident of this split from their correspondence: it gradually became more and more rare, less cordial and more businesslike. The correspondence is accompanied by a commentary.