The article examines the peculiarities of disclosing the “Volga plot” in the works by E. Chirikov and A. Tolstoy. Comparing several E. Chirikov’s Volga fairy tales with fragments of Tolstoy’s trilogy The Road to Calvary, which take place on the Volga, the author concludes that if Chirikov’s Volga is the last truth and constant in the world of forgery and entropy, then Tolstoy is the condition and reason for the adventures sought and greedily acquired by the characters and the author. Chirikov reads the “Volga text” as the Holy Scriptures during the divine service, and Tolstoy lives it together with the characters of his Volga travels. These differences, according to the author of the article, are based on differences in the tasks faced by the literary generations to which the two artists belonged: whereas the generation of Chirikov, born in the 1860s, had to be a generation losing God, and the “Volga worship” of Chirikov — worship in a dilapidated temple, Tolstoy, who inherits this generation, goes another way, namely, returns to the rite, during which he enters into magical relations with nature and with spirits. Such a rite is Tolstoy’s “Volga adventures,” combining Eros and Thanatos, food and all the accompanying table paraphernalia.

Based on emotional psychology, the article examines how Japanese students perceive the works of A. Platonov. We asked 53 survey participants to read his stories “The Unknown Flower (Fairy Tale)” and “Return” and to answer questions about the degree of absorption, appreciation and to what degree they were moved in connection with what they read. Survey participants also wrote in free form, their opinions about the artistic features of the stories as well as about the worldview depicted in them. A quantitative analysis of the results shows that, in general, Japanese students found it difficult to sympathize with Platonic stories, although they demonstrated immersion in the text and appreciated the works. Qualitative analysis shows that the students entered into a dialogic understanding, quite freely developing their thoughts about the theme and expression of the stories. Students paid particular attention to three thematic elements: a) suffering and its reward (in “The Unknown Flower”), b) multiple points of views and human relations (in “Return”), c) a sense of the uncontrollability of life (in “Returns”). Given that Japanese students read Platonov’s stories without sufficient knowledge of their historical and cultural contexts, one can conclude that these thematic elements can provide material for discussing what constitutes a “universal” appeal (in terms of accessibility to readers of different times and cultural backgrounds) of Platonov’s literary works.

In ethnographic materials of the 19th and early 20th centuries, there is a legend about the appearance of a deer on a victim. This legend usually appears along with a description of the rite of sacrifice of a pet as a motivation for the ritual practiced in the Orthodox rural community until the 1930s among northern Russians, Komi, Karelians, Vepsians, and other peoples. Based on the plot of the legend, researchers of the last century attempted to reconstruct the pre-Christian beliefs of the Slavs or Finno-Ugric peoples. They considered the legend of the deer phenomenon in Komi ethnography similarly. The author of the article analyzes various forms of explication of the legend about the phenomenon of deer in materials and research according to the Komi tradition. That allows the author of the article to substantiate the reasons for forming the concept of the Finno- Ugric origins of the plot of this legend and to prove the fallacy of this hypothesis.

The article is devoted to the participation of A.N. Tolstoy in Gorky’s project The History of the Civil War, which was approved by the Resolution of the Central Committee of the CPSU(b) on July 30, 1931. The article examines two aspects of this involvement. The first aspect is Tolstoy’s work on editing the volumes of the History of the Civil War in the USSR. Tolstoy was supposed to be editing the third volume of The First Steps of Intervention and the Disruption of Respite. However, in 1943, after the release of the second volume of the series, the concept of the publication History of the Civil War in the USSR was changed, and there was no need for literary editing. The second aspect is the work on the novella Khleb (Oborona Tsaritsyna) (Bread (Defense of Tsaritsyn)) written as part of the The History of the Civil War series. For the first time, the article presents Tolstoy’s letters to the editor of the historical section of The History of the Civil War, I.I. Mints, and letters in reply, and letters from Mints to the writer’s literary secretary, O.B. Nikiforova, from the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI) and State Literary Museum (GLM). The publication and introduction of this correspondence allow us to see and evaluate the writer’s creative process and the degree of immersion in the historical materials of described period of Soviet history. The article clarifies the dates of the beginning of work on the novella and its completion. The article presents some reader reviews, including J.V. Stalin. All of them influenced the text in further reprints. The materials of the article can be used when commenting on the novella in A.N. Tolstoy’s Complete Works.

The first volume of Andrei Bely’s novel Moscow was completed in 1925 and published by the publishing house “Krug” in 1926 in two parts or two books: Moscow Oddball and Moscow Under Attack. Comparison of the autograph, typescript and proofs of the novel with the edition shows fundamental differences between the author’s conception of the novel and the editions of “Krug.” The article examines the differences related to the titles (volumes, parts, and chapters) and the structure of the text (its division into parts, chapters, and subchapters). The analysis of archival sources, correspondence and memoirs makes it possible to clarify the “author’s will” and reconstruct Bely’s ideas about Moscow in print. He did not plan to divide the novel into two parts, nor did he intend to give each part a separate title (he envisioned the novel as a whole, in one book). He would like to indicate on the title page that this is only the first volume of the novel. He would give the first volume of Moscow back its title: Ivan Ivanovich Korobkin (it was refused at the pre-press stage). The article proves that the transformations that took place with Bely’s novel arose from the technical capabilities of the Krug publishing house, on the one hand, and its advertising and commercial policy, on the other hand.

The article focuses on one of the crucial issues of academic commentary on the second part of Aleksey Tolstoy’s trilogy, The Road to Calvary, the novel The Eighteenth Year, namely its text sources. The research establishes that the work relies on various and diverse materials. For example, the main storyline of Vadim Roschchin’s time in the Volunteer Army, the course of the first and second Kuban campaigns, the battles of the White and Red Armies in southern Russia, as well as, partially, the depiction of the leaders of the White movement was based on Anton Denikin’s The Russian Turmoil, mainly the second and third volumes titled The Struggle of General Kornilov. August 1917 – April 1918 and The White movement and the struggle of the Volunteer Army. In his novel, Tolstoy also used P. Tocheniy’s essay August 1918 events at Nezhinschchina, which was published in the Ukrainian Istpart journal Chronicles of the Revolution in 1926; the memoirs of N.V. Gerasimenko, published in 1922 under the title Makhno in the historical and literary anthology Historian and Contemporary; and the Notes on the 1918 Czechoslovak revolt with blueprints of the military campaigns, which were found in the writer’s archive and are either an abstract review of an unknown eyewitness account or the eyewitness account itself.

The sources of A.N. Tolstoy’s novella The Adventures of Nevzorov, or Ibikus are the writer’s diaries, which contain notes on the events of 1917–1919. Comparing them with the text allows us to judge how the writer used this material in his work on The Adventures of Nevzorov. Relying on the notes made during the October Revolution and the evacuation from Odessa in April 1919, Tolstoy recreated the chronicle of these events in the story and conveyed the mood of those around him. Also we can single out the notes that formed the basis of a particular plot of the story, that is, the struggle between white and red counterintelligence in Odessa in 1918–1919. The study of diary entries helped to identify the real prototypes of the story. Thus, the prototype of the Moscow artist and anarchist Count Chamborin was George da Lafar, and the “dangerous revolutionary” Burstein, sailing from Odessa to Constantinople, was P.N. Rutenberg. Along with the entries in the diary, there are documents of the epoch. Thus, among the sheets are pasted a newspaper clipping about the Futurists’ Christmas tree in December 1917 and the order of the Rostov mayor K.M. Grekov. Both documents appear in The Adventures of Nevzorov.

The destruction of the Chevengur commune by a “machine force” at the end of the novel has received various interpretations in the studies of Platonov scholars. According to some, it was destroyed during the Civil war by a unit of the White Army, according to others, by a unit of the Red Army, or by an abstract opponent who was part of a symbolic interpretation of the novel. Based on the analysis of the characters involved in this scene, as well as taking into account last researches, we prefer the interpretation according to which Platonov places ideological emphasis on the situation of 1927–1929 and sees Bolshevism, which gained the upper hand during these years, as the main enemy of Chevengur. Based on experiences with Hamburg students, the article raises the question of which kind of community, in a more abstract sense, was destroyed in Chevengur.

The article is devoted to textological issues of Platonov’s literary heritage, which are to be addressed and solved by the first scientific collection of the writer’s works, being prepared at the IWL RAS. The author focuses on the text history of the writer’s second novel Happy Moscow” which for a long time was considered as unfinished. It was first published in 1991 from an autograph of the family archive. The article observes the stages of the writer’s work on the novel, which began in the summer of 1933. Based on the identified realia, reflected on the last pages of the autograph, the research establishes the period when the manuscript was finalized (the second half of December 1934 – the first days of 1935). With all the signs of the novel’s incompleteness (the absence of the note “The End,” which is traditional for all the writer’s autographs; about a hundred questions in the margins with various marks have not been removed; the author’s numbering of chapters ends at the 9th chapter; on the first page of the autograph the title Happy Moscow is crossed out and another one is added, etc.), the author puts forward and proves the thesis about the fundamental incompleteness of this novel, its special status in Platonov’s creative searching in 1932/1933–1935, and at the same time the integration of Happy Moscow in the historical and literary context of the time. The paper lies on the latest theoretical researches, analysis of manuscript materials from Platonov’s personal funds, and data from the publishing funds of the Russian State Archive of Literature, which make it possible to reconstruct the history of the novel’s text and its editional history.

The article examines one of the early chronicle plots, which is based on a conflict of perception of situations and actions, leading to deviant behavior and criminal acts. Using the example of the plot about gathering tribute from the Drevlyans by Prince Igor in the Tale of Bygone Years, the article shows that one of the distinctive features of the texts of this group is the absence of a direct assessment, and the plot lines developed or outlined in them are built on obvious or hidden conflicts of perception by the opposing parties of situation. The characters’ speeches play a significant role in the formation of this plot. In most cases, they represent collective prescriptive speech acts with a typical non-verbal reaction of the characters to whom they were addressed, and a perlocutionary effect, which finds expression in the implementation of verbal appeals by specific actions. A comparison of the original plot with its versions in other chronicle collections shows that in some cases the scribes completely reproduce the text from the Tale of Bygone Years (Lviv Chronicle), while others change historically significant details, still generally preserving the plot outline (Ustyug Chronicle in the copy of L.S. Matsievich, Arkhangelsk Chronicle), and others transform the plot into a short annual record (Vologda Chronicle, Rogozhsky Chronicle). The plot transforms most noticeably in the Book of Degrees, in which the originally hermeneutic narrative simplifies to an ordinary crime plot, common in Russian history. Collective prescriptive speech acts play a significant role in this simplification and plot transformation.