“How we write” - then and now

The article compares and contrasts two of the homonymous collections “How We Write”, published in 1930 and 2018 correspondingly. The purpose of the first collection was twofold: firstly, to convince the authorities in the complexity and the need for literary works; secondly, to inform young working-class writers about basic techniques of creative writing. Moreover, for such outstanding contributors as Andrey Bely, Maxim Gorky, Evgeny Zamyatin, it become the space for poetologic reflection, summarizing the creative experience of literature of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The article notes that in the same years Boris Pasternak tackled similar issues in his “Safe Conduct”. The second collection was conceived by Pavel Krusanov as a serial continuation of the first one. In the absence of clearly set goals, it nevertheless has some of poetologic reflection. Its content generalizes the creative experience of the modernist literature, as it turns out, not interrupted, but only muffled in the postmodern period, and continued in the 21th century. The key point of this reflection is practically proven belief in the theurgic nature of art. Thus, the way opens to solve general aesthetic issues about the place of literature in culture and the boundaries between literature and reality. The author notes that literary creativity in the 21th century regains prestige as an existential practice among highly educated intellectuals of both human and natural profile. And theurgic potential of literature creation is being used in their compositions as a working technique.