Information about the author:
Lyudmila Yu. Surovova
Lyudmila Yu. Surovova, PhD in Philology, Senior Researcher, А.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Povarskaya St., 25A, bld. 1, 121069 Moscow, Russia.
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6163-1530
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Abstract:
The writer Ivan Sergeevich Shmelyov did not leave German-occupied Paris and bravely endured everything that the Parisians endured during the Second World War. Shmelyov met the news of Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union with approval, as did his friend theologian A.V. Kartashev. Both hoped that German troops would help free their homeland from the hated Bolshevism. But the Nazis, taken by Shmelyov at first as redeemers and deliverers, gradually began to show their true colors. Shmelev’s views on the events of the Great Patriotic War and World War II underwent a serious transformation during 1943–1944. And the victory of the Russian arms he already welcomed almost as a Soviet patriot. Shmelyov did not find common ground with the editorial board of the pro-fascist newspaper “Parizhskiy vestnik”, with which he cooperated during the years of German occupation. He disagreed with the newspaper’s attitude to the Russian people as an inferior race and sought to prove the opposite with his work, exalting the power of pre-revolutionary Russia, describing its material and spiritual riches. The article traces for the first time the evolution of Shmelyov’s views on the events of World War II and the Great Patriotic War with the involvement of previously unexplored archival documents.
Keywords: I.S. Shmelyov, World War II and the Great Patriotic War, Russian Emigration, epistolary heritage, newspaper “Parizhskiy Vestnik”, national traditions.
