АВТОРСТВО КАК «ДОСТИЖЕНИЕ РАБОЧЕГО ЧЕЛОВЕКА» В АВТОБИОГРАФИЧЕСКИХ КНИГАХ УРАЛЬСКИХ РАБОЧИХ 1930-Х ГОДОВ

Abstract

The article analyzes the phenomenon of the so called author-worker, who turned to literary creativity and created a fictional autobiography, in which the living conditions of the proletarian before and after the revolution of 1917 were opposed. In the historical and literary context, the author considers, in particular, the role of the UralAPP, which predetermined the creation of the novels "I Love" (1933) by Aleksandr Avdeenko and "My Life" (1936) by Agrippina Korevanova, the story "My School" (1934) by Aleksei Bondin, and memoirs of workers of the Vysokogorsky iron mine “True stories of the mount Vysokaya” (1935). The role of Maksim Gorky in the final editing and publication of these works is noted. In the 1930s, he repeatedly attempted to find the sources for “human rebirth” under the influence of new living conditions. Institutionally, these efforts resulted in the creation of a number of autobiographical books – "historical documents", by Gorky’s definition, the authors of which – the proletarians, exotic for the written culture, demonstrated the emergence of a new Soviet subject. They created texts from which the editors removed most of the traces of the author's lack of culture, lack of mastery of the word, leaving the hero's story about overcoming lack of culture. The autobiographical hero, endowed with the will to culture, emerges from the "darkness", an important part of which is the very proletarian existence. Reading and then writing are portrayed as the main result of the "shock work" of the author and the state, which provided the subject with the opportunity to master a complex form of self-presentation – a detailed fictional autobiography, become a writer and change radically his social status, taking the highest place in the symbolic hierarchy of professions in the same field as the well-known "masters" of written culture.