“Should we talk about Nekrasov now?”: Textual criticism and D.S. Merezhkovsky’s “Secret Vision”

Abstract

The author of the article has undertaken a source study of D. S. Merezhkovsky’s work “Nekrasov’s Mystery” (1913) in the context of the modernization of Russian classics at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. This has been done for the purpose of clarifying ideas about the modeling of a writer’s identity in the minds of contemporaries and descendants. For the first time, the history of “Nekrasov’s Mystery” has been reconstructed from lecture and newspaper publications of its fragments to the final version as part of the study “Two Mysteries of Russian Poetry: Nekrasov and Tyutchev” (1915). The researcher used documents from archives, as well as little-known materials from pre-revolutionary periodicals. A comprehensive comparison of printed, typewritten and handwritten sources was carried out. In addition to the textual reconstruction, the problem of the lecture’s reception by contemporaries is studied. The earliest reviews by the lecture’s listeners and by critics have been analyzed and systematized. Based on the facts presented, it is argued that Merezhkovsky, maneuvering between aesthetics and politics, modernizes the personality and work of Nekrasov to solve journalistic problems, and therefore his speeches should be read in the context of other socio-political statements (and not just literary-critical, as was done previously) by the thinker of the 1910s concerning Narodism, patriotism, revolution and religion, and in the biographical perspective of his connections with Russian émigré revolutionaries.