“Returning to the original meaning of words is the task of every poet”: Nikolay Gumilyov's unknown review of Rene Schickele's poetry

The aim of the study is to introduce into scholarly discourse Nikolay Gumilyov's unknown review on the poetry of the Alsatian author Rene Schickele. The work was carried out on the material of unpublished protocols of the publishing house World Literature, stored in the Archive of the A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The researchers used biographical, historical-genetic and textual (extraction, structuring, attribution, commenting) methods. The compilation of a preliminary bibliography showed that works by Rene Schickele have not been properly recognized in Russia. In the course of the work, it became clear that Schickele's name appeared in the domestic periodicals back in the early 1910s. In the 1920s, after all the vicissitudes of Russian-German intercultural relations, interest in the latest German literature and German expressionism was growing in the young Soviet state. The study of archival sources showed that Schickele was discussed at meetings of World Literature in early 1921, that is, on the eve of a surge of interest in German expressionism. The publishing house received both prose and poetry by the Alsatian author. The reviewer of Schickele's prose was E.M. Braudo. He received the collection of short stories Die Madchen [Girls] and the novel Der Fremde [The Stranger] for reviewing. Gumilyov evaluated Schickele's poetic works. The poet presented his review at the meeting of the editorial board of World Literature on March 22, 1921. In the review, Gumilyov reflects on the strengths and weaknesses of Schickele's poetry, on the possibilities of its translation into Russian, as well as on the need for such work. Gumilyov's judgments arouse the interest of Akim Volynsky, who entered into a discussion with the poet about the language of modern poetry and the tasks of poetic creativity. An illustration of this is the publication by the authors of the study of the unfolding discussion with comments.

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