"Dormitory" by V. Zazubrin as a "failed" story (on the basis of critical assessments by contemporaries and party censorship)

The target of this work is to analyze the perception of the story of the Siberian writer V. Zazubrin “Dormitory” in the critics of the 1920s. The analysis involves archival materials from the State Archives of the Novosibirsk Region, the Siberian periodicals and Zazubrin's correspondence with M. Gorky. After the first publication in 1923 in the magazine “Siberian Lights” the story was reissued only once - in the collection “Dormitory”, published by the Novosibirsk book publishing house in 1990. However, a comparative analysis of the text in this publication with the publication of 1923 showed that it contained significant reductions concerning the most outspoken naturalistic descriptions of the “communist way of life”. Using the funds of the State Archives of the Novosibirsk Region showed that the first publication of the “Dormitory” caused a sharp criticism by the Glavlit of the RSFSR, after which censorship of local literature was significantly strengthened. The article analyzes the poetics of the story in the context of those claims that were put forward to the author. The thematic convergences of the “Dormitory” with the works by B. Pilnyak, I. Babel, S. Malashkin and other authors of the 1920s are shown, which included erotic episodes in their texts. In the late 1920s, they were regarded as “pornographic”, and by the 1930s literary erotica is included in the category of forbidden topics. Analysis of critical reviews of the story led to the conclusion that it was the publication of the “Dormitory” that opened the fatal page in the fate of Zazubrin whose life tragically ended in the cellars of the Lubyanka in 1937, after which his name was forgotten for decades.