Leonid Semenov: on the history of a failed literary reputation

Abstract

The article is devoted to the life and work of a well-known Lermontov scholar, archaeologist and folklorist Leonid Petrovich Semenov (1886–1959). The paper traces the main events of his scientific biography, but the focus is not on his achievements as a scientist but on the history of his literary, primarily poetic, works. Family sources of his literary predilections are brought to light. Without betraying the philological call, the author realized himself as a writer in a narrow circle of his relatives and friends (including the Vladikavkaz circle of V. Merkurieva, involved under the pseudonym “Sergey Argashev” his brother Sergey Semenov). The home circle has become that particular ‘institution’ which provided him with, even if to a limited extent, the effect of participation in literary life (producing a family journal “Mayak” (“The Lighthouse”) and literary success, albeit illusory. While literary criticism was an ‘official’, external, ‘institutional’ form of personality manifestation, poetry, on the contrary, was an internal one, the only way of self-realization in conditions of decades of spiritual restraint.

Keywords

• l.p. semenov
• lermontov studies
• cossack folklore
• philological poetry
• literary reputation
• journal “mayak”
• s. argashev
• v. merkurieva