“And I also Want to Work, to Learn and to Live”: a Letter of A. Severny to M. Gorky

Abstract

The paper discusses the correspondence of A. M. Gorky with a provincial forgotten writer Arkady Alexandrovich Vdovin (pseudonym Arkady Severny). Severny's letters to Gorky are not only the one of the few sources for Severny's biography, but also an important source of data for the yet-to-be-written history of the province's post-revolutionary literary life. They illustrate the mass literary movement of the 1920s and 1930s, and introduce new information about Gorky's informal interest in supporting the interest of aspiring authors in literary work. Gorky's correspondence with aspiring writers from the provinces enriches perceptions about the history of Soviet everyday life, characterizes the alignment of literary forces grouped around writers' unions, literary practices of local associations of proletarian writers, everyday behavior of their members. Severny is a writer who positioned himself as a member of the Moscow Association of Proletarian Writers. Little is known about his biography. The fact of his presumed residing in the Volga Region is retrieved according to some newspaper publications. They show that Severny repeatedly recited his poems in different corners of Saratov. His autobiographical poem “About Myself” published on 26th of the November, 1925 in “The Bolshevik Juveniles” demonstrates that he was taken into Komsomol and had a background of a factory worker. He accentuated his proletarian origin to get in touch with Gorky. In the early 1930s, Severny's letters to Gorky remained unanswered. The reason for this was Severny's attempt to sell Gorky's letters to him to the editors of the Leningrad magazine “Rezets”.