Back to the USSR: Kuprin and Gorky represented by V.E. Gushchik (1938- 1940)

The paper is prepared within Project IUT 34-30 "Ideology of Translation and Interpretation of Ideology: Mechanisms of Cultural Dynamics under the Russian Empire and Soviet Power in Estonia in the 19th-20th Centuries." The study is based on two texts of the Russian emigrant Vladimir E. Gushchik (18921947): the article "Kuprin has left" (1938) and the unpublished essay "The Great Heart (Another page of M. Gorky's life). Memories" (1940). Analysing the articles and the history of the writer's relationships with his contemporaries, the author focuses on how Gush-chik perceived and assessed social and cultural figures who lived in emigration and in the USSR. This method allowed describing two stages in the ideological evolution of the former Northwestern Army officer N.N. Yudenich, who, since the late 1930s, was getting more loyal to the USSR to become a secret agent in the spring of 1940, a few months before the annexation of Estonia. Personal contacts between Kuprin and Gushchik, who exchanged books and held correspondence, demonstrated their warm friendly feelings and gave each of them creative impulses. Gushchik perceived Kuprin as a literary and personal authority, which determined the complete acceptance of his position in the article "Kuprin has left." As it follows from Kuprin's letters to Gushchik, the writer, who had returned from emigration, agreed to remain silent and not to criticise the USSR in the exchange for maintenance and quiet life. Kuprin's death was an important impetus to Gushchik's reflections on his future, as it is reflected in "Prosaic poems (On the death of Kuprin)", published in the collection of short stories "Life" (1939). The rapprochement with the Estonian, and later with the Soviet power in 1939-1940 seemed to the writer the right choice to escape from the growing sense of hopelessness. After the annexation of Estonia in July 1940, Gushchik was a member of the Ministry of the Interior and served as a boundary secretary, but in August he was transferred to the Tallinn City Administrative Department, and then appointed to the much less prestigious post as Director of the Zoo. On January 4, 1941, Gushchik was arrested by the NKVD. Two months before his arrest, in October 1940, he wrote his memoir of A.M. Gorky "The Great Heart", which tells how Gorky tried to patronise the cartoonist P.E. Shcherbov. Gushchik emphasises that Gorky did not distinguish between his literary and defense activities. Gorky's creativity and life are integral and inseparable, being united by the writer's humanism. The writer is represented as an integral and disinterested, morally impeccable personality, an ideal role model to be admired.

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