Vsevolod Ivanov and his Serapion brothers

Alot of research works have been addressing the history of the Serapion Brothers literary group, however this organization and its place in the literary process of the XX century remain understudied, and this problem can be solved only through studying new archival materials concerning the Serapions, which have not been previously introduced into circulation. The relevance and novelty of the article are determined by the fact that it presents an attempt to clarify and specify certain aspects of the brotherhood’ history by investigating recently published little-known ego-documents of one of the Brothers - the writer Vsevolod Ivanov. The author uses the method of historical and literary commentary to analyze Ivanov’s letters of 1922 and 1923 addressed to writers Aleksey Tolstoy and Kondratiy Urmanov, which demonstrate both the close connection of the young writer with the Serapion Brothers and the creative disputes between them. Another group of documents, Ivanov’s correspondence with Konstantin Fedin dating back to December 1925, shows the former’s contradictory attitude to the Serapions’ program manifesto: both Ivanov and Fedin are unanimous on “ideological” issues, while the question of searching for the creative path in his new works, the stories from his best book The Secret of Secrets, is answered by Ivanov through the argument with the Serapion Brothers (primarily with the Westernizers among them), in particular with their understanding of artistic language. Finally, Ivanov’s memoirs about the Serapions published in various publications and stored in the family archives, examined from the point of view of text history, show how during the period of persecution against the Serapion Brothers literary group Ivanov sought to create a nearly perfect portrait of it, emphasizing its significance for the literary process of the XX century.