Soviet historical novel in the mirror of a historical source (The Fate of the Pleshcheevs by Aleksandr Glumov and letters from Aleksey Pleshcheev to Vasily Zhukovsky)

The article examines the Soviet historical trilogy by Aleksandr Glumov about the fate of Aleksey Pleshcheev (1778-1862) and his family; it was published by the publishing house Sovetskiy Pisatel’ (Young Freethinkers, 1959; At the Turn of the Century, 1965; The Fate of the Pleshcheevs, 1973). The involvement of Pleshcheev’s two sons in Decembrist societies prompted Glumov to present the history of this family as a reflection of the first stage of the development of the revolutionary movement in Russia (in accordance with Lenin’s scheme). Pleshcheev, a music lover and composer, is depicted in the trilogy as a secret freethinker, accustomed to silence about his beliefs during his years of study at the St. Petersburg Jesuit boarding school. Anastasia Pleshcheeva, his wife, is represented by Glumov as a victim of Emperor Paul I’s violence, which made her like-minded with her husband in hatred of the supreme power. The constructions associated with the central images of the trilogy are not confirmed by historical sources, with which Glumov was well acquainted. The creation of the trilogy was accompanied by a huge research work of its author in libraries and archives. Glumov was a well-known musicologist, as well as the director of musical and literary concert performances, which testified to his high educational and cultural level. In the trilogy, he managed to give a wide panorama of the life of Russian noble society at the end of the 18th - first quarter of the 19th centuries. In his memoirs, Glumov admitted that the depiction of many scenes, episodes, plot twists and historical figures was dictated not by the biography of the hero, but by the author’s interest in various historical and cultural phenomena and personalities, primarily from the musical, theatrical and literary world. The freedom with which Glumov worked on the biography of the hero was focused on well-known literary samples and justified by the author’ s desire for creativity outside the narrow framework of historical verisimilitude. The trilogy was written as an adventurous historical novel with many events that did not exist in Pleshcheev’s life. Nevertheless, the narrative of Pleshcheev’s incredible adventures was combined with the use of archival documents, which were quoted for the first time on the pages of the trilogy. Thus, the article presents evidence of Glumov’s acquaintance with the unpublished letters of Aleksey Pleshcheev to Vasily Zhukovsky for 1809-1841. Glumov quoted excerpts from eight letters of the poet from 1812-1814. However, his attitude to this historical source was selective, and he did not use those letters that contradicted the ideological structure of the plot and figurative constructions of the trilogy. For example, the ridicule in Pleshcheev’s letter about Zhukovsky’s joining the militia in 1812 turned out to be inappropriate, as well as the call for him to immediately leave the theater of military operations and return to the family shelter. Glumov used another letter to date Pleshcheev’s opera Forced Marriage, but did not mention the contents of this letter, which spoke of Pleshcheev’s wife as a coquette, crossing out the novelist’s constructions about the tragedy she allegedly experienced in the tsar’s palace. Glumov’s trilogy was intended for a highly educated reader, but could not fully satisfy him, since it left behind a lot of questions about the reality of a number of events presented in Pleshcheev’s biography. This can explain the absence of reviews of the trilogy and references to it in research papers, since it is extremely difficult to separate genuine biographical events from fictional ones in the work. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

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