Article

Name: The First Edition of the Vsevolod Ivanov’s “Armor Train 14, 69” (1922): The History of Early Reception

Authors: I. E. Loshchilov

Institute of Philology of Siberian Branch of Russian Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk, Russian Federation; Novosibirsk State Pedagogical University, Novosibirsk, Russian Federation

In the section Vsevolod Ivanov. Literature of Siberia

Abstract: The article is devoted to the history of the reception of the first edition of the story of Vsevolod Ivanov “Armored train 14, 69”, created by the writer in 1921 and first published in the first issue of the magazine “Krasnaya Nov” in 1922. The first edition is known in two versions: magazine and book: the story came out as a separate edition in the summer of that year. Until 1932, the story was printed in the first book edition, with minor variations. The same edition formed the basis of the modern scientific publication (2018). After 1932, the text of the story, which retained its “classic” name, was repeatedly redone by the author with the participation of editors and censorship. The article collected information and quotes from reviews, reviews, and reviews primarily from 1922–1925. It is shown that the first critics paid special attention to the politics and ideology of the story and its author. Only a few of them appreciated the truly revolutionary poetics and aesthetics of the story, written by the author in line with the plot and narrative experiment of the literary group “The Serapion Brothers”, to which Vsevolod Ivanov joined immediately after moving from Siberia to Petrograd. In many responses, the story was compared with the novel by Boris Pilnyak “The Naked Year”, excerpts from which were printed in the same issue of the magazine. Party and proletcult criticism was satisfied with the propaganda potential of the story, its “usefulness” for agitation in favor of the Soviet regime. However, both in the Soviet Union and in exile they often drew attention to the fact that the "red" and "white" ("White Guard") lines developed in the early edition on an equal footing, in the plot counterpoint. In later editions, the feeling of equality of two lines gave way to an unequivocal advantage in favor of the “reds." The author’s ideology was often read as peasant or neo-people’s (“Scythian”, “Socialist Revolutionary”), which also caused doubts among the literary ideologists of the country of the victorious proletariat. A simplification of the psychological portrait of the characters was noted, which was fundamentally important for the “Serapion Brothers”. The most insightful judgments about the story belonged to the member of this literary group, critic and literature historian Ilya Gruzdev and futurist poet Alexei Kruchenykh. Both drew attention to the dialectical interaction of storylines with extra-plot elements (phonetic zaum, imitation of vernacular and accents, onomatopoeia, etc.).

Keywords: Vsevolod Ivanov, Soviet literary criticism of the 1920s, emigrant criticism, “The Serapion Brothers”, plot

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