To the History of A. Blok’s Response to the UFF Questionnaire (1918): Based on the Correspondence of F. Sologub, S. Kondurushkin and Others

Abstract

The article examines A. Blok’s response to a questionnaire of the Union of Fiction Figures (UFF), written in May 1918 for a one-day newspaper on the theme “The Ways for the Revival of Russia” (not published). The analysis of the state of the issue reveals insufficient study level of the history of the text and contradictory information about it in the research literature. The article proposes to analyze Blok’s note in the context of his attitude to the UFF in 1918 on the material of unknown correspondence between Union activists (F. Sologub, S. Kondurushkin, An. Chebotarevskaya, etc.). The published set of letters for the first time makes it possible to concretize the history of the making of UFF, to reconstruct the main idea of the newspaper, and the reasons that prevented its implementation. It turns out that in addition to objective reasons (closing of non-Bolshevik publications, problems with printers), there were also internal ones, in particular, the refusal of the newspaper editor to further edit because of the heterogeneity of the collected material. The article assumes that Blok’s note played no last role in this decision since the poet deliberately contradicted the main idea of the newspaper by replacing the survey question “What should a Russian citizen do now?” with the one “What should an artist do now?” The presented research proves that Blok’s “answer” was of polemical way, firstly, towards the creative intelligentsia protesting against the Bolsheviks; and secondly, towards the writers who declared a boycott of him after the publishing of his poem “The Twelve.”

Keywords

• a. blok
• f. sologub
• s. kondurushkin
• an. chebotarevskaya
• union of artists
• union of fiction figures
• response to a questionnaire
• one-day newspaper
• correspondence
• textology