Two Anatolys and One “Angelica”: On the History of the “Southwestern Literary School”

Abstract

The subject of the paper is the cultural life of Odessa in the 1910s, and the reconstruction of Anatoly Gamma’s biography, who was 21 when he died in the fall of 1918. His creative life was very short, and appeared to be almost a literary hoax. However, Gamma’s poetry reflected a radical change in the artistic paradigm after the Revolution of 1917. Here the authors reprint all the existing Gamma’s poems published in 1917–18 in the Odessa periodicals. After the tragic death of another Odessa poet Anatoly Fioletov at the age of 21, Gamma’s name happened to appear in obituaries dedicated to both poets. One of those memorial articles entitled “On Two Anatolys (Anatoly Gamma, Anatoly Fioletov)” was published in the Kharkov magazine “Muses” under the nom de plume “Angelica d’Éspré,” which the authors decipher in this essay. Most importantly, being associated with Anatoly Fioletov, Eduard Bagritsky and other Odessa poets, Gamma became a part of a cultural phenomenon that was called by Viktor Shklovsky in 1932 the “Southwestern Literary School.”

Keywords

• literary odessa
• russian futurism
• post-revolutionary culture
• a. gamma
• a. fioletov
• e. bagritsky
• v. mayakovsky
• m. semenko
• v. shklovsky
• southwestern literary school