«Had a chance to be at the front...». War pages of the biography of philologist Nikolai Gudziy

Abstract

The publication tells about war episodes in the biography of the historian of literature and philology, teacher N.K. Gudziy – about his two trips to the front of the Great Patriotic War (together with his colleague, literary scholar D.D. Blagoy), organized by the Political Directorate of the Red Army in March and July 1944. The first of them was connected with visiting combat units of the Baltic Front and giving lectures to officers and soldiers about Pushkin. The importance of the second was due to the participation of Gudziy and Blagoy in the work of the Commission for the Establishment and Investigation of the atrocities of the Nazi Invaders in the Pushkin Reserve (the scientists visited the Pushkin Hills, Mikhailovskoye, Petrovskoye, Trigorskoye, and the Voronich hillfort). For a detailed account of their preparation and implementation, previously unpublished field diary entries by Gudziy were used. The text of Gudziy and Blagoy’s article «A Trip to the Front» is republished in full. In addition, articles by Gudziy and Blagoy, published in central and front-line newspapers in 1944 and written hot on the heels of the aforementioned trips, are cited.