“Two souls”: antinomies of history Russian literature of the 20th century. Book review: Sokolov B.V. “He was white - he became red”. Soviet writers in the ranks of the white guards. Moscow, Veche Publ., 2023. 384 p. (Literature and history)

Review of the book by Boris Vadimovich Sokolov, published in the series “Literature and History” of the “Veche” publishing house and dedicated to the fate of Russians (Soviet) writers biographically associated with the Red and White Army, focuses on the problem of the unity of the historical, literary and socio-cultural process in the twentieth century, which has long been perceived and studied exclusively from ideological positions that left an imprint on the assessment of aesthetic phenomena themselves. New, previously unreachable factual materials and their original research interpretation make B.V. Sokolov’s monograph, oriented towards the widest readership and at the same time not losing its academic significance, a real event at the modern stage of understanding the creative biographies of N.S. Tikhonov, V.P. Kataeva, Vs.V. Ivanova, M.A. Bulgakov, S.Ya. Marshak, S.A. Auslender, M.E. Koltsov, N.N. Arnold. The book presents a panorama of the literary life of the post-revolutionary epoch, the participants of which were writers who, due to different circumstances, found themselves in the white camp but subsequently never (or almost never) remembered publicly their involvement in the white movement and were forced to adapt to the Soviet reality, to which each of them had their own attitude, their way to its acceptance/rejection. B.V. Sokolov presents his reconstruction of the “White Guard stage” in the life of writers, emphasizing the hypothetical nature of his conclusions and avoiding peremptory judgments in every possible way, inviting future researchers to further research and academic polemics.