Essays by Viktor Ya. Iretsky in the Context of the Journalism of 1917 and 1918

This article aims to initiate a study of an extremely interesting body of texts by Viktor Ya. Iretsky that were published in the major metropolitan newspaper Rech' [Speech] and caused a resonance in 1917-1918. The study of the originality of the half-forgotten prose writer's revolutionary journalism in the context of the ideological searches of the author's famous contemporaries - M. Gorky, V.G. Korolenko, L.N. Andreev, A.A. Blok, I.A. Bunin - seems relevant. Based on newspaper, magazine, and book collections of the National Library of Russia, the Library of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and the House of Russia Abroad, the article analyzes the essays published in Rech' from March 1917 to August 1918 using historical-literary and intertextual research methods. In the course of the research, the author selected the most revealing essays that are comparable to well-known journalistic works about the revolution, analyzed their artistic originality, evolution, and similarity to the journalism of 1917-1918. Iretsky's texts are thematically and ideologically similar to Andreev's articles and diary entries, Korolenko's writings, and - particularly - Gorky's cycle published in Novaya Zhizn' [New Life]; however, theses texts describe the facts, moods, and the revolutionary atmosphere from the point of view of an observer who opposes the revolution and, since May 1917, sees it only as destructive force. The author concludes that Iretsky's essays, reflecting the metamorphoses of the intelligentsia's perception of the revolution, problems close to Gorky's and Korolenko's notes, are more similar to emigrants' diaries, especially Bunin's Cursed Days, in their confessional nature, antiBolshevik pathos and artistry. The specificity of Iretsky's texts is explained by the attention to specific everyday material immersed in the cultural and historical context. The value of the essays is determined by its orientation to everyday life, inclusion of the living tissue of life in the texts; by its confessional nature, which back in 1917 and 1918 revealed a critical emigrant attitude - then expressed in diaries only - to the course of the revolutionary transformation of Russia; and by the inclusion of expressive historical and cultural figurative elements. Abstracting, analyzing the situation from the point of view of European history and culture (including the ideals of the French revolution), using images of works of Russian literature (Dead Souls by Gogol, The Cherry Orchard by Chekhov, The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky, etc.) and reminiscences on them, Iretsky does not approach authors of political pamphlets, but rather such important figures of Russian journalism as Maxim Gorky and Vladimir Korolenko, and the diary prose of the brightest Russian writers.

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