K. I. Chukovsky`s Nekrasov Questionnaire and D.S. Merezhkovsky

Abstract

The paper examines D.S. Merezhkovsky’s responses to the famous Nekrasov questionnaire by K.I. Chukovsky, who presented it to his contemporaries by publishing some of the responses in “Chronicle of the Writers` club” (1921). In the preface he pointed out the modernists’ decisive role in reviving the poet’s legacy during the 20th century. In the second (1926) and third (1930) editions Chukovsky changed the list of surveyed poets, which suggests that as a publisher he intended to reflect the new literary hierarchy. In his three publications of the Nekrasov questionnaire he justified his decisions by the views he assumed while working with the material and by the current sociocultural situation. The paper focuses on the handwritten draft of D.S. Merezhkovsky’s responses (1919), which appeared partly in the first edition and were only fully published in 1988. Merezhkovsky was more outspoken than before in his judgement of Nekrasov’s poems about the people, suspecting poet`s speculation on this subject. He also exposed his true attitude to the “feminine” and “masculine” streams of the Russian culture. His responses to Chukovsky deconstructed the artificial concept that he had established in his works “Two mysteries of Russian poetry” and “The poet of eternal femininity”. His intuitively delicate and convincing definition of the currents of Russian culture ran into a contradiction with Nekrasov that emerged in his response. In truth he regarded Nekrasov as a figure of the “masculine” stream of culture, which is a driving, active, rather than a contemplative and passive creative element.