The History of Early Reception
The article is devoted to the history of the reception of the first edition of the story of
Vsevolod Ivanov “Armored train 14, 69”, created by the writer in 1921 and first published in the
first issue of the magazine “Krasnaya Nov” in 1922. The first edition is known in two versions: magazine and book: the story came out as a separate edition in the summer of that year. Until
1932, the story was printed in the first book edition, with minor variations. The same edition
formed the basis of the modern scientific publication (2018). After 1932, the text of the story,
which retained its “classic” name, was repeatedly redone by the author with the participation of
editors and censorship. The article collected information and quotes from reviews, reviews, and
reviews primarily from 1922–1925. It is shown that the first critics paid special attention to the
politics and ideology of the story and its author. Only a few of them appreciated the truly revolutionary
poetics and aesthetics of the story, written by the author in line with the plot and narrative
experiment of the literary group “The Serapion Brothers”, to which Vsevolod Ivanov joined immediately
after moving from Siberia to Petrograd. In many responses, the story was compared
with the novel by Boris Pilnyak “The Naked Year”, excerpts from which were printed in the same
issue of the magazine. Party and proletcult criticism was satisfied with the propaganda potential
of the story, its “usefulness” for agitation in favor of the Soviet regime. However, both in the
Soviet Union and in exile they often drew attention to the fact that the "red" and "white" ("White
Guard") lines developed in the early edition on an equal footing, in the plot counterpoint. In later
editions, the feeling of equality of two lines gave way to an unequivocal advantage in favor of the
“reds." The author’s ideology was often read as peasant or neo-people’s (“Scythian”, “Socialist
Revolutionary”), which also caused doubts among the literary ideologists of the country of the
victorious proletariat. A simplification of the psychological portrait of the characters was noted,
which was fundamentally important for the “Serapion Brothers”. The most insightful judgments
about the story belonged to the member of this literary group, critic and literature historian Ilya
Gruzdev and futurist poet Alexei Kruchenykh. Both drew attention to the dialectical interaction of
storylines with extra-plot elements (phonetic zaum, imitation of vernacular and accents, onomatopoeia,
etc.).
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The History of Early Reception // Сюжетология и сюжетография. 2019. № 1. Pp. 29–49. DOI: 10.25205/2410-7883-2019-1-29-49.