The Collected Works of Vladimir Narbut: Archives, texts, and approaches

Abstract

The last lifetime poetry collection of Vladimir Narbut was published in 1922. Started by the poet in the 1930s, work on the preparation of the book of selected poems Spiral was interrupted by his arrest and, subsequently, tragic death in Kolyma in 1938. Since then, separate editions of Narbut’s works have been published three times: in 1983 the poet Leonid Chertkov compiled a collection Vladimir Narbut. Selected Poems in France; in 1990 N. Panchenko and N. Byalosinskaya published the book Vladimir Narbut. Poems in the USSR; in 2018 the OGI publishing house published the book Vladimir Narbut. Collected Works. Poems, Translations, Prose. The third, latest in nearly a hundred years, reference to the works of one of the most distinctive poets of the era in the context of preparing a separate collection of his oeuvre actualized the issue of developing approaches to be guided by when compiling the forthcoming collection. The key element here seemed to be the comprehension of the experience of preparing the previous separate editions of 1983 and 1990, as well as the scientifically commented publications of Narbut’s works made by researchers in the literary periodicals of the late 20th - early 21st centuries. The closest correlation of the tragic ups and downs of Narbut’s life with the “geological upheaval” of the 1917 Revolution and the Civil War led to the ambiguous dependence of the posthumous fate of the poet’s creative heritage on the context of the era, diametrically opposed and mutually exclusive attitudes in the perception of key events in Russian and world history of the 20th century. The preparation of Narbut’s collected works was planned in the interconnection of two directions: (1) the continuation of work to eliminate the “blank spots” in the poet’s biography, and (2) the formation of the most complete collection of Narbut’s fiction for the first time supplemented, in addition to poetic texts, with prose and translations. In preparation for the publication of Narbut’s literary texts included in the collected works, the issue of using a real commentary as the main approach in preparing notes was updated, taking into account the biographical, historical, literary, folklore, mythological, and linguistic aspects. Directions were set by the thorough work that began in the 1983 edition, and especially in the 1990 edition. The bulk of research on Narbutov’s texts and biographical facts was carried out in the funds of the Odessa Literary Museum and the Odessa National Library named after A.M. Gorky (Odessa periodicals of the 1920s), in state and private archives and funds of Moscow, including the Manuscript Department, the main and newspaper funds of the Russian State Library, in the department of manuscripts of the Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts, in the archives of the Federal Security Service, the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History, the State Archive of the Russian Federation.