About the author:
Manfred Schruba, Prof. Dr. phil. habil., Professore Associato di Slavistica, Università degli Studi di Milano, Dipartimento di Scienze della Mediazione Linguistica e di Studi Interculturali, Piazza Indro Montanelli 1, 20099 Sesto San Giovanni (MI), Italia.
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9174-2998
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Abstract:
The paper expounds the reasons and circumstances of Ivan Bunin’s failed collaboration (except one publication in the inaugural number) with the review and publishing house “Russian Annals” (Paris; Shanghai, 1937–1938, no. 1–20/21). The analysis is based on the unpublished materials from the archival fund of the review’s secretary M.V. Vishniak from the Hoover Institution (Stanford), in particular, his correspondence with the publisher M.N. Pavlovsky and with the editor P.N. Milyukov in the years 1938–1940 (i.e., essentially, the review’s and the publishing house’s inner editorial correspondence) amounting to some 200 letters. Numerous quotations from these letters are adduced, reporting the content of the conversations and the correspondence of M.V. Vishniak with Ivan Bunin, with vividly expressed evaluative elements. The materials, introduced for the first time into scientific use, offer new traits to Bunin’s personal and artistic biography for the years 1938–1939, in particular, some readers reactions on Bunin’s in memoriam in the newspaper “Poslednie Novosti” on the occasion of Fyodor Shalyapin’s death.