Image of P. P. Bazhov in the Modern Russian Media: A Biographical Turn

Abstract

This article considers issues underlying the way in which academic literary criticism studies the life and fiction of P. P. Bazhov and their further interpretation by the Russian media in the 2010s. Special attention is paid to the interpretation problem of the writer’s biography, whose facts are partly related by the writer himself in his fiction and self-commenting texts (e.g., letters and essays), partly discovered and published by researchers after his death. Academic literary criticism provides three main interpretations of Bazhov’s creative behaviour, characterising him as an “orthodox” Soviet writer, a genius loci of the Urals, and a conformist writer with a modernist standpoint. The article reveals a paradoxical way in which the results of such interpretations and information reported by Bazhov about himself are used in popular scholarly and mass media texts. On the one hand, the cult of a classic writer, formed as a result of “solidary reading”, is simultaneously supported and destroyed by various versions of the “life-creating performance” of the author, a character of a popular lecture or article. Support is expressed in the recognition of his indisputable significance when the variety of interpretations of Bazhov’s biography facts, including those that are easily refuted by academic criticism, is perceived as a guarantee of the viability of the classic author’s name in social space. On the other hand, “secret” biographical information, which was not a subject of public autobiographical reflection of the author for a variety of reasons (which is quite understandable in the case of Bazhov), is presented to the public as the most interesting. Consequently, the reduction of the writer’s image, uncontrolled by the expert community, leads to a change in values, when the focus shifts from the results of his creative work to unverified “scandalous” facts of the writer’s biography which make the reader attached emotionally though not profoundly.