A.M. Gorky: a confessional image of the writer through the eyes of V.F. Khodasevich and N.N. Berberova as a egodocument of the Russian emigration

Gorky played an important role in the literary and cultural life of Russian Berlin in 1921-1923 and in particular in the creative career of its most prominent representatives, VF. Khodasevich and N.N. Berberova. The writer and these literary figures of the first wave of Russian emigration were united not only by the common literary work, i.e. the “Beseda” journal in Berlin, but also by their life stories (they lived with Gorky in Germany in 1922-1923). V.F. Khodasevich rightly pointed out that the “emigration” period of the 1920s remained to be the least studied part of Gorky’s life. In this regard, the purpose of the article is to recreate an objective image of Gorky, the one free from the ideological cliches of Soviet literary studies and based on the confessional memoirs of the inner circle of the writer in those years, namely, the essays of Khodasevich from “Necropolis” and “Italics” of Berberova. In the course of a comparative analysis of the egodocumentary texts about Gorky, the specifics of constructing the image of the writer by Khodasevich and Berberova are described through the relationship of artistic and documentary principles, the combination of objectivity and subjectivity. The result of the research is the formulated main oppositions that Khodasevich and Berberova used to demonstrate the ambiguity, ambivalence of Gorky’s image. It is important to note that the “dual” and full of contrasts image of Gorky - while moving beyond the Soviet myth of the “iconic” and barefoot writer - often took new mythological features on. The emigre writers dismissed the Soviet “cult of personality” of Gorky, but at the same time created their own myth about him.