First attempt at writing: about the unpublished tale by Lev Kuzmin ‘The star of happiness’

The article provides a literary analysis and historical-literary commentary on the unpublished tale of the Perm writer Lev Ivanovich Kuzmin (1928-2000). The text entitled The Star of Happiness is a manuscript (typewritten) signed by the author himself. It was found in the personal archive of the writer stored in the Perm Local History Museum. The article provides attribution, approximate dating of the manuscript, and the analysis of the structure and genesis of the text. The fairy tale The Star of Happiness, presumably written before Lev Kuzmin’s move to Perm, in Pushkin (Tsarskoye Selo) or in the Kemerovo region, where Kuzmin worked as a construction worker, became the first literary experience of the novice writer. The analysis of the genre nature of the text and its structure was conducted in accordance with the methodology of the fairy tale analysis proposed by V. Ya. Propp and in correlation with the existing indexes of fairy tales. It showed that the tale by L. I. Kuzmin contains some reduced properties of the epic, the tale (legend), rudiments of the heroic epic (heroic fairy tale), united by the genre form ‘novina’, characteristic of the Soviet culture of the 1950s. Novina is stylization of folklore devoted to an important (usually political) event. The reason for the creation of the fairy tale The Star of Happiness was the agreement between the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China as well as Mao Zedong’s visit to Moscow in 1949-1950. In addition to the archival materials, the comments of the writer’s son Andrei Lvovich Kuzmin are used in the paper. The analysis helps to clarify the components of Lev Kuzmin’s literary heritage and the mechanisms of functioning of dictatorial, political, literary, and folk discourses in the mass consciousness of the 1950s.