Controversiae et recensiones 892 which allows one to read the monographs as a literary trilogy. When analysing creative failure, the non-completion of creative work and creative crisis, the research team addresses various aspects of these phenomena, interpreting them from the points of view of the author, the reader and the critic in both synchronic and diachronic terms. Considered from many angles, the same work can be simultaneously regarded as a creative miscalculation and a text containing elements of innovation. As can be seen from the materials presented in the trilogy, the entirety of the twentieth century was marked by signs of crisis: it is to these crises and its literary personalities that the three monographs are devoted.

The paper is devoted to the poetry of Boris Volkov, the forgotten author of the Eastern emigration (1894-1954). During his lifetime, only a single collection of his poems, “In the Dust of Foreign Roads,” was published in 1934. The plot movement in the book appears as the memory narrative, reflecting the dramatic life experience of the author. He finds himself in the very midst of Russian history, at the beginning of the 20th century: participation in the First World War, service in the White Army, fight against the Pan-Mongol movement of Ungern, flight to China, and emigration to America. Of particular intrigue was the last part of the book “Brought on the scaffold. Excerpts from a poem,” with the action taking place during the anti-Spanish revolution in the Netherlands of the 16th century. The study has shown that the dramatic turns of the author’s biography, during his struggle against Ungern, are reflected through the roll call of historical epochs. The analysis involved Volkov’s memoirs dedicated to this period. The image of an inquisitor who burns heretics and the pictures of executions refers to the episodes of sophisticated torture of prisoners initiated by the baron and captured in Volkov’s memoirs. Thus, the work implicitly draws the author’s modernity, the events of the 16th century, into its whirlpool by making it one of its reflections.

Литература восточной эмиграции в журнале «Русские записки»: к проблеме несостоявшегося диалога * Исследуются произведения авторов восточной эмиграции в журнале «Русские записки» (1937-1939), представленные в их литературном окружении. Проанализирована история журнала, выявлены причины отказа его парижской редакции от первоначальных намерений стать «культурным мостом» между двумя полюсами первой эмиграции: восточным и западным. За время существования «Русских записок» на их страницах были представлены произведения только трех харбинских авторов: «Песни об Уленспигеле» А. Несмелова, рассказ «Степной Ворон» Б. Волкова и «Стихи одного дня» А. Ачаира. Исчез со страниц журнала и раздел «Дальневосточное обозрение», представлявший картину социально-экономической и культурной жизни края в первых трех номерах. Причиной отказа от совместного проекта парижская редакция выдвинула "отсутствие художественного вкуса и чутья" у восточных авторов. Однако анализ опубликованных произведений показал, что их качество не уступает качеству произведений парижских литераторов. Ключевые слова: культурный диалог, литература первой эмиграции, журнал «Русские записки», восточная эмиграция, Арс. Несмелов, А. Ачаир, Б. Волков, «парижская нота». * Работа выполнена при поддержке гранта РНФ № 19-18-00127 «Сибирь и Дальний Восток первой половины XX века как пространство литературного трансфера»

This study focuses on The Light of Arkhangelsk, a prose collection by Igor Silantyev, a Novosibirsk-based author and philologist. The subject of the analysis is the poetics of transformation that unites all the works in the book. The autobiographical framework that forms the subject of the memoir determines the creation of the author’s artistic myth, in which everything is possible: a mixture of present and past, past and unprecedented, the real and the unreal. Allusions to the works of Gogol, Hoffmann, N. A. Ostrovsky, and other writers flicker in the text. At the same time, the reminiscent field of the collection is fraught with wide possibilities for interpretation. The book is also full of many musical leitmotifs. The author plays with genres masterfully. In his artistic universe, confession is mixed with fairy tale, legend, dream, horror, etc. And vivid images undergo many metamorphoses, arising in the memories of the self-narrator through the principle of complicity. At the same time, all the meanings found in the collection are devoid of direct manifestation but are presented from the position of homo ludens — not in the postmodern meaning of a literary game for the sake of the game. However, the grotesque phantasmagoria of transformation does not become the theatre of the absurd in the book. The ethical position of the author, whose emblem is the title of the collection, puts a limit to such confusion. The plot of I. Silantyev’s book conceals many different states of mind presented in the light of the “final understanding” of the finiteness of earthly existence and the eternity that opens behind it. It is no coincidence that the leading leitmotif images in it are wings, the sun, the dawning sky that has overcome the night. This essential layer supports the basis of hope, which is so shaky in today’s world that is losing value orientations.

The published work analyzes the lyrics of Boris Volkov - an almost neglected poet, prose writer, memoirist of the Eastern emigration - in a dialogue with the ancient Chinese tradition. The poetry of Li Chi (690-751) and Cui Hao (704-754) is in the field of research attention. Volkov enters into an intertextual dialogue with their work in the poetic cycle “Dragon Devouring the Sun”. The cycle is included in the poetry collection «In the Dust of Foreign Roads», published in Berlin in 1934 and never reprinted. Of the entire book of poems, the cycle “Dragon Devouring the Sun” stands out for its poetic immersion in the exotic world of ancient China. In addition to poetic texts, the poet refers to Chinese legends, to the ancient history of the country.