Evolution of V.B. Sven’s Creative Work: From Essays and Stories to the Big Epic Form

Abstract

The article for the fi rst time attempts to introduce into the Russian cultural circulation the creative heritage of V.B. Sven, whose 120th anniversary of birth was celebrated in 2017. This writer of the second wave of Russian emigration is now almost unknown in homeland. His works, however, deserve to be noticed by Russian readers and researchers. Firstly, V.B. Sven’s works, due to their high artistic level, are an integral part of Russian culture. Secondly, the writer refl ected in his literature a number of interesting historical and cultural phenomena, characteristic of the era he wrote about. A literary analysis of V.B. Sven’s works is given in correlation with his unusual biography. Many facts from the writer’s life are refl ected only in sources diffi cult to access; they are presented to a wide audience in this work for the fi rst time. The article considers the specifi cs of V.B. Sven’s creative style in the evolutionary development. The article develops a periodization of the literary array created by the writer and justifi es the conditionality of its division into periods. It shows the infl uence of M.M. Prishvin on the work of V.B. Sven, determines the place of the writer in the emigrant literature, analyzes the reviews of his works written by his contemporary critics-emigrants. Much attention is paid to the artistic innovation of V.B. Sven, his experiments in the fi eld of artistic form, inherent in later works. The article highlights the mystical element in the worldview and, accordingly, in works of the writer, and the specifi c cultural phenomenon closely associated with it — Miklashevsky’s “system”, which became the content and structural center of one of his works. The article distinguishes between the diffi culty of seeing any V.B. Sven’s lifetime printed publications, on the one hand, and the availability of texts of his works in digitized form, on the other. There is emphasized the importance, in a situation like this, of information about the existence of the works, about their merits and accessibility. The references to the article include a list of sites where the main works of the author can be found.