REVISITING THE FATE OF SIMBIRSK LIBRARY OF THE LITERARY CRITIC AND PUSHKINIST PAVEL VASILYEVICH ANNENKOV

Abstract

The name of Pavel Annenkov belongs to the cohort of those remarkable figures of the Russian culture of the past, who after 1917 were almost completely forgotten. Except for the volume of his «Literary Memoirs», which was reprinted in 1928 and which quickly became a bibliographic rarity, and his memoirs about his meeting with N. V. Gogol in Rome in 1841, Annenkov was usually mentioned only as one of the opponents of the democratic revolutionaries. Attempts to present an objective portrait of him were few, and their results became known only to a narrow circle of specialists. Nevertheless, Annenkov knew personally K. Marx, A.I. Herzen, I.S. Turgenev, N.V. Gogol, N.P. Ogarev, and V.G. Belinsky. For his works on Pushkin, in 1880 when establishing a monument to Alexander Pushkin in Moscow on his birthday on June 6, Moscow University elected Annenkov as its honorary member. The situation changed a hundred years later, when in the 1980s some of Annenkov’s literary and critical articles began to be reprinted, then his «Literary Memoirs», «Paris Letters», «Pushkin in the Alexander Era» and, finally, in 1984–1985, his famous «Materials for the Biography of Alexander Pushkin» were reprinted twice. Published in a large circulation, with detailed introductory articles and comments, these books not only expanded the modern reader’s understanding of the literary and social life of Russia and Western Europe for almost three quarters of the past century, but also presented a close-up portrait of its author. However, the return of P.V. Annenkov to modern culture, in particular, to regional history, cannot be considered entirely accomplished. The author examines individual pages of Simbirsk stage in the biography of the writer and the fate of his library. It is concluded that Annenkov’s contribution to the cultural development of Simbirsk Volga region is of great interest for researchers of the Russian history in our time.