An Unrealised in Sofia Collection of Studies on Gogol (1932?): An Attempt at Reconstruction

Abstract

This article is situated in émigré studies and tries to reconstruct a possible conceptual framework and creative history of the Collection of Studies on Gogol, which was being prepared for publication in Sofia in the early 1930s. I use in my research the “microscopic method” proposed and practiced by Professor Piotr Bicilli. My only source of reconstruction are Bicilli’s published letters to A. Bem (1931–1934), as I have not discovered a manuscript of the collection or any other information about it until now. P. Bicilli started to collect articles in 1931 in Sofia, and A. Bem contributed to the initiative, working in Prague. The collection might have been planned as a festschrift on the occasion of upcoming 80th anniversary of N. Gogol’s death (1932). Several participants in the Dostoevsky Study Seminar in Prague, which was highly appraised by Bicilli, were invited to contribute to the collection. Besides being a joint émigré project, the collection was declared as a common Russian-Bulgarian initiative, which involved scholars from the Sofia University. Collection of Studies on Gogol remained unpublished, and the formal reasons, for that were financial, but behind them we can see other reasons related to the capacity of “Russian Sofia” as an émigré centre and to the ability of limited number of adherents around Bicilli to withstand a publication that offers “new rea- dings” and places Gogol between realism traditionally assigned to him and modernist interpretations. Quests and reflections around the Gogol Collection gave an impetus to studies of works of Gogol and Dostoevsky works and coincided with the most fruitful period in the field of literary studies in Bicilli’s life – the first half of the 1930s, when he offered a conceptual model for the Russian literary history.

Keywords

• gogol collection
• p. bicilli
• а. bem
• émigré centre
• festschrift