APOLLON GRIGORIEV IN STUDIES OF V.N. TURBIN’ SEMINAR PARTICIPANTS

Abstract

The documents from Anna I. Zhuravleva’s personal archive allow us to trace the genesis of Ap. Grigoriev’ critical legacy interpretations, which originated in the student paper that Zhuravleva prepared together with E. Zhukovskaya at V.N. Turbin’s seminar “Lermontov in critique (1860s)” — for the 2nd Lermontov Student Conference which was held at Leningrad State University in May 1958. Th e paper is placed in the context of publications and research of the late 1950s and early 1960s, which tended to show the return of Grigoriev, who for ideological reasons had been virtually erased from Russian cultural history during the preceding period. Th e paper (based in part on Grigoriev’s District Epistle…, then unpublished, which had recently been found in the Mikhail Pogodin Collection in the Lenin State Library by V.Ja. Lakshin, a postgraduate student of the Philological Faculty of Moscow University) discusses Grigoriev’s own classification of literature into a serious and useful literature committed to the people, and literature of imitation. Th e reactions on this paper, as refl ected in the conference’ transcript, provide an opportunity to assess the extent and nature of interest in certain aspects of Grigoriev’s work (above all the tendency of the academic audience to “rehabilitate” Romanticism). Th e themes, approaches and even, in spite of the young age of the authors, some formulations that are important for A.I. Zhuravleva’s later studies (the so called narodnost’ in literature, the value of romanticism, the comic element) emerge in the paper. However, she would later write about Apollon Grigoriev as a critic, mainly in connection not with Lermontov, but with A.N. Ostrovskij.