Mikhail Prishvin’s Dunino library: On the writer’s reading preferences and “eternal companions”

The article raises relevant questions for the study of Mikhail M. Prishvin’s heritage - about the structure of his library, formed over several decades, about his reading preferences and “eternal companions”. In 1946 Prishvin bought a house and a plot of land in Dunino near Moscow, which he called his homestead. Here he spent the last years of his life, going to Moscow only in cold weather. Thus, the writer sought to build a circular composition of his life, referring in memory to the Khrushchevo estate, associated with the distant years of his childhood. Dunino for Prishvin was the world, which he created and built for himself, for his own internal use. This world was quite closed, only occasionally welcoming joy-briging communication. In Dunino, the writer worked in seclusion, using a small library with books selected from two libraries - of his own and of his wife Valeria D. Prishvina. The Dunino library received new books both during the writer’s lifetime and after his death. Based on the analysis of Prishvin’s works, his diary entries and memoirs sources, the article identified books that the writer referred to as his “eternal companions”. These include the Gospels, the works of Mikhail Lermontov, Alexander Blok, Sergei Yesenin, Vladimir Solovyov, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Anton Chekhov, William Shakespeare, Jack London, Knut Hamsun, Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil. A Prelude to the Philosophy of the Future by Friedrich Nietzsche, and a small atlas through which Prishvin followed the events of the Great Patriotic War. Many of the books contain notes by Prishvin, quite important for understanding the directions of his creative pursuits. His “eternal companions” included musical compositions, which, like poetic texts, were to be devoid of “man-made nature” and were to sound “like a prayer”. The library included various dictionaries, publications related to the writer’s hobbies (photography, driving and care of a car, hunting, nature conservation). During his life in Dunino, Prishvin read works by his contemporaries, including those published in periodicals, with particular attention to the magazines Ogonyok and America. A significant place in the library belonged to editions with inscriptions by their authors and Prishvin’s own books, which he tried to improve (for example, he whited out his own picture which he did not like, changed the image of a dog because the image suggested by the artist seemed unconvincing to him). The writer, unlike Prishvina with her characteristic escape from time, read newspapers. This brought him closer to the inhabitants of manor houses, many of whom regularly read the news in newspapers. The Dunino estate had another manor tradition - reading aloud works that Prishvin recently wrote and favourite works by other authors to the closest people.

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