From the “shadow environment” of Mandel’shtam: Ivan Aksenov (1910s)

Abstract

The current situation with the development of archival sources, inaccessible and for various reasons dropped out of the field of view of the source researchers, related to the literary process of the 1890s – early 1930s and received an active scientific circulation in recent decades in Russia and in the Russian Abroad, allows a new perspective to look at many of its main and often seeming secondary components. The same can be said about the biographical portraits of its participants, – both those who have always been in the field of the most close attention, and those who previously remained on the periphery of the study of this fragment of the history of Russian literature. In many ways, those factors determine one of the most relevant areas in the study of the life and work of Osip Mandel’shtam: an attempt to restore the maximum possible circle of his regular and episodic communication throughout his career. This publication is the first part of the research devoted to the reconstruction of the professional and personal relationships between two active participants of the literary process of the 1910s – 1930s – Osip Mandel’shtam and Ivan Aksenov.