S. M. Gorodetsky’s newspaper essays about the First World War as the pretexts of the novel “Gardens of Semiramis”

The article considers the creative history of S.M. Gorodetsky’s unfinished novel “Gardens of Semiramis”, the events of which take place during the First World War on the territory of Western Armenia, where the poet himself was located during 1916. When creating the novel, the author used his own essays published in the newspaper periodicals of the war years as the main source, reworking them to create a work of fiction with a documentary and biographical basis. Comparing the essay “Meeting with the Kurds”, published in the newspaper “Russkoye Slovo” in August 1916, and the chapter of the novel “The Auditor General and his Companions”, we describe the principles of how Gorodetsky works with non literary material. He created individual motifs, subject images, characters and episodes of the novel based on his own life experience (real people and events). In the literary text, Gorodetsky abandons the figure of the autobiographical narrator and “transmits” to some of the characters his own thoughts, assessments and actions, thereby emphasizing their proximity to the author’s position. It is concluded that newspaper essays perform the function of a plot “synopsis”, which unfolds in the novel, transforming into various compositional forms and enriched with additional plot elements. The change in the ideological orientation of the novel in comparison with the essays is caused by a change in the worldview of Gorodetsky, who critically assessed the First World War in Soviet times.