Biographical myth about M. Gorky and artistic reality: The dramatic trilogy “Three versions of one fate. Plays” by N. Pributkovskaya

The aim of the research is to characterize the ways of interpreting biographical myths about M. Gorky based on the analysis of N. Pributkovskaya’s dramatic cycle “Three versions of one fate”. The origins of formation of the future writer’s worldview, his relationship with E. P. Peshkova, as well as the reasons for Gorky’s moral crisis in the last years of his life are developed as the debatable positions of Gorky’s biographical myth. The article deals with the main qualifiers of the artistic world of the plays, the logic of the plot of the trilogy, and the principles for selecting facts from the writer’s biography. Scientific novelty consists in introducing into scientific use the plays created using unpublished materials from M. Gorky’s personal correspondence, a comprehensive analysis of the trilogy as an artistic unity carried out for the first time, since there are currently no literary studies devoted to N. Pributkovskaya’s dramaturgy. As a result of the research, the specificity of the trilogy genre has been determined as a synthesis of various types of documentary nature: epistolary (human document), models of artistic personal identification (the writer’s early works), documentary topoi (Nizhny Novgorod at the end of the 19th century). It is shown that the subjectivity and evaluativeness of the author’s position appeals to the perceptive consciousness of the modern reader/viewer, indicating a change in the ontological status of Gorky’s myth.