“Nobody Considered Me a Fraudster Yet...”: S.M. Alyansky Letters to L.D. Blok (1922–1924)

Abstract

The article, based on publication of S.M. Alyansky’s letters to L.D. Blok (1922, 1924), reconstructs the history of relations between the owner of “Alkonost” and the poet’s widow, who transferred the exclusive rights to all of Blok’s works to Alyansky. The article clarifies the details and circumstances of business negotiations between Alyansky and representatives of the “Slovo” publishing house in Berlin, which published Blok’s collected works (three volumes of poems and “The Theater”) in 1922, as well as the financial conditions for publishing a ten-volume collection of Blok’s works under the “Alkonost” brand in the publishing house “Epokha” (Berlin, 1923). The main subject of consideration is a fact unknown in Block studies — the fraud allegations made against Alyansky by L.D. Blok. The introduced archival materials do not only shed light on this incident, but also prove the unsoundness of the insinuations put forward against the owner of “Alkonost”, whose publishing and royalty policies were determined by professional enterprise and high — “knightly” — moral qualities.

Keywords

• a.a. blok
• l.d. blok
• m.s. alyansky
• publishing houses “alkonost”
• “slovo”
• “epoch”
• collected works
• copyright
• honorarium policy