Literary-critical and journalistic texts of D.S. Merezhkovsky, written in the 1880–1890s and not included in the «Eternal Companions». Towards the question of author’s self-representation

Abstract

The author of the article investigates the circumstances (biographical, ideological, historical, literary, textual), according to which D.S. Merezhkovsky, who repeatedly changed the composition of the book «Eternal Companions» (based, as it is known, on the writer’s early publications), discarded and never included any part of his literary-critical and journalistic works of the 1880s-1890s (with the exception of the brochure «On the causes of decline and on new trends of modern Russian literature») in his lifetime books and collected works. For the first time, based on numerous ego documents («Autobiographical note» of the writer, his epistolary, including the archival, legacy and the memoirs of contemporaries), with the involvement of responses from reviewers of Merezhkovsky’s early articles scattered around periodicals and for the most part never republished, it is proposed to look at the texts that turned out to be ultimately on the sidelines of the author’s attention, not immanently and not within the framework of his extensive literary-critical heritage, which was repeatedly discussed by scholars, but in connection with the self-representation of the writer. As a result, the conclusion is substantiated that those «forgotten» speeches of Merezhkovsky, on the one hand, provide rich material for comparing them with the «ceremonial» self-portrait that the writer created in his lifetime publications, and on the other hand, bring to a new level the conversation about the correctness of the thesis on the “total unity of the artistic world” of Merezhkovsky beyond the context of the author’s supercyclical formations.