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Abstract: The article deals with the 1920s reviews and critical assessments of the journal essay by A. A. Blok “The Last Days of the Old Regime” and its expanded version “The Last Days of Imperial Power,” published as a separate book in the publishing house “Alkonost” in 1921. Using the historico-literary, comparative, and biographical methods of research, the author analyzes the importance of the early reviews in assessing the journalisticdocumentary work of the poet. Many of the reviews in question are mentioned or partially cited by researchers. But there has not been any holistic understanding of the reviews of the 1920s. The study identifies artistic and factographic characteristics. An idea is suggested that the review of S. Streich, published during the life of Blok in the first version of the essay, could be reflected by Blok and might affect his subsequent editing. It is emphasized that critics' assessments diverged both in evaluating the artistic merits and the historical accuracy of the essay. M. Prishvin did not find any aesthetic value, and V. N. Storozhev, G. Lelevich, A.F. Romanov denied this work of Вlok historical significance. The main claims boiled down to the absence of document citations. The article explains some of the reasons why the author could not provide accurate data. A number of claims are removed by attracting handwritten materials from the archive of the Pushkin House as evidence. For example, a reproach in the haste and carelessness of writing the text turns out to be unfair after getting acquainted with the drafts of the essay, marked by many amendments and refinements in the margins, inserts, and strikethrough marks. Indications of the absence of information on the exact location of the published documents are explained by the conditions of Blok’s work in the Emergency Investigation Commission. The novelty of the article is due to the use of handwritten materials, a number of which are presented for the first time. It is concluded that the value of early reviews lies not only in the presentation of Blok’s journalistic work to the general public, but also in those analytical observations that marked the stage in the poet’s work associated with the emergence of a new documentary-fiction (docufiction) genre. It is suggested that the lexical element of the post-revolutionary time and the experience of working with documents influenced the style of the 1920 essay “The Answer to the Question of the Red Press,” which anticipated the satirical works of the mid-second half of the 1920s. This confirms the observations of the critics Streich and Storozhev, who noted new semantico-stylistic features of Blok’s writing from opposite points of view.

About the author(s) :

Elena I. Kolesnikova

Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkinskiy Dom) RAS (Saint Petersburg, Russia)

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4441-565X

Publication Timeline:

Date of receipt: 28.09.2023; date of publication: 31.10.2023

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