On Some Very Important “Literary Enterprise Relative to General Culture” in Soviet Publishing House “ACADEMIA”: Ivan M. Grevs’ and Vladimir D. Bonch-Bruyevich’s Correspondence (Early to Mid-1930s)

The paper deals with a correspondence between the historian Ivan M. Grevs and the director of the State Literary Museum in Moscow Vladimir D. Bonch-Bruyevich concerning the redaction and editing of the almanack “Zvenja” (the most important periodical in Russian literary criticism for the 1930s) in the Academia publishing house. Basing on a large corpus of archival funds, the authors reconstruct the history of making and publication of the almanack. The task was complicated a lot by the transfer of the Academia’s editorial board and staff from Leningrad to Moscow (while the imprimery facilities did not move). The lack of paper and materials, as well as the political repressions against the head of publishing house (Lev Kamenev) and staff members made it even more difficult. I. Grevs and V. Bonch-Bruyevich are concentrated on the edition of Ivan Turgenev’s collected papers (the volume was supposed to be printed at the Academia publishing house). They are also discussing in their correspondence the articles that Ivan Grevs intended to publish on the 50th anniversary of Turgenev’s death. The letters give the demonstration of the efforts that I. Grevs made in order to support Turgenev Museum in Orel and clearly show Grevs’ desire to be engaged in the exploration of Turgenev’s, Lev Tolstoy’s, Nikolay Kareev’s unpublished papers. Another conversation topic in the correspondence under review was Ivan Grevs’ idea to buy the entire corpus of Turgenev’s letters to Pauline Viardot and Evgenya Lambert kept in Paris. In Grevs’ point of view, this epistolary corpus could constitute an integral part of Turgenev’s legacy in the forthcoming publication of the Academia publishing house. Despite the fact that these projects did not succeed in their undertaking, the letters of I. M. Grevs and V. D. Bonch-Bruyevich provide a lot of information on the Academia’s functioning in the early 1930s and the making of Soviet literary criticism of this period.