“The First Poet of Siberia”: Materials for the Biography of Georgy Maslov

Abstract

The biography of Georgy Vladimirovich Maslov (1895–1920), a talented Russian poet and literary critic whose life was cut short during the Civil War, still has white spots. His poems and essays turned out to be scattered among hard-to-reach provincial and émigré newspapers, journals, and collected volumes. Handwritten copies of his works had a difficult fate, like the people who kept them. Of particular importance for clarifying biographical and textual issues are the memories of the poet’s contemporaries. We are publishing for the first time two documents of 1920, written by Maslov’s friend, bibliologist and literary historian N.V. Yakovlev: a list of Maslov’s preserved works and unpublished memoirs about him and his work. In the article, we try to explain in a new way some facts related to Maslov’s stay in Kolchak’s Omsk in 1918–1919, his participation in the military and civil service, as well as his attitude towards Bolshevism.

Keywords

• georgy v. maslov
• new materials for the biography
• russian poetry of the early 20th century
• civil war in russia
• alexander v. kolchak
• white omsk