Reception of Vsevolod Solovyov’s creative works in the Russian literary criticism

Abstract

The paper deals with the views of the contemporaries on the creative works of Vs. S. Solovyov – a famous Russian historical fiction writer of the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the author of the five-volume “Chronicle of Four Generations.” The aim of our study is to give the first in the history of the Solovyov studies analytical review of some critical works which were published in the leading Russian journals and newspapers of the indicated period (“The Historical Herald”, “St. Petersburg Bulletin”, “The Russian Herald”, “The Russian Thought”, “The Russian Antiquity”, “The Observer”) and are considered by us to be the most essential, and also to identify the main tendencies in the evaluation of the writer’s heritage which existed in the Russian literary criticism at that time. On the basis of the detailed analysis of the significant number of the works dedicated to the comprehension of the novelist’s creative way the author of the paper comes to the conclusion that at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, despite the recognition of the readers, the literary and critical reception of his heritage was rather contradictory and it was characterized by a wide range of subjective opinions and evaluations. Characteristic of the prose writer’s literary activity by N. A. Engelhardt, A. A. Izmailov and P. V. Bykov was extremely positive. A. M. Skabichevsky and N. N. Sokolov, on the contrary, estimated it negatively and spoke disdainfully of the fiction writer’s artistic method. Particular emphasis is put on the fact that in the articles by K. P. Medvedsky who often wrote under the pen name K. Petrov diametrically opposite assessments of Vs. S. Solovyov’s creative works are presented. Such ambiguity in the perception of the writer’s literary heritage is explained by the fact that his contemporaries regarded the historical novels created by him mainly from the position of the evaluating and subjective criticism. They were compared by the critics to the works of the genre founder – the Scottish writer Sir Walter Scott, as well as to the outstanding works of the Russian classical literature. As a result of this comparion, numerous “drawbacks” were noted by them. In the course of time, the emphases were shifted and in the face of Vsevolod Solovyov they saw an original creator, worthy of taking a prominent place among the Russian historical writers.