«“I Had a Long Corres­pondence with Litnasledstvo”: On the Story of Adamovich’s Failed Participation in the Preparation of the Bunin Litna­sledstvo Volume

• Main Author: Oleg Anatolyevich Korostelev
• Format: Article
• Language: Russian
• Published: Ural Federal University Press 2017-06-01
• Series: Известия Уральского федерального университета. Серия 2: Гуманитарные науки
• Subjects: Г. В. Адамович; И. А. Бунин; А. К. Бабореко; С. А. Макашин; «Литературное наследство»; русская эмиграция; мемуары; «оттепель».
• Online Access: https://journals.urfu.ru/index.php/Izvestia2/article/view/2454

This article considers one of the earliest attempts of Soviet editors to resume the relationship with emigrants during the thaw period. Letter interchange as well as any kind of interaction between Soviet editors and emigrant authors was extremely rare at the time. One of the first attempts to get émigré authors to cooperate was the Bunin volume of the Literaturnoye Nasledstvo (the famous LiteraryHeritage series), whose preparation began in the mid-1960s. While working on the volume in 1966, the Litnasledstvo editors asked Georgy Adamovich to write memoirs about Ivan Bunin. Their correspondence lasted for several years (1966—1970), and the memoirs were finally written, but the thaw period had also come to an end, and, consequently, the publication was impeded by the Soviet censorship. The return of Bunin and émigré literature to Soviet Russia was only partially successful at the time. This article is accompanied by an appendix containing all the extant correspondence of Georgy Adamovich with the editors of the Bunin volume: it was preserved in the editorial archive of the Literaturnoye Nasledstvo and is now kept in the Department of Manuscripts of the Gorky Institute of World Literature (OR IMLI, F. 575).