“How we built the subway”: about one story of the project “History of factories and plants”

UDC 82-4(02)

https://doi.org/10.20339/PhS.5-22.171

Bystrova Olga V.,

Candidate of Philology, Senior Researcher

Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences

e-mail: bystrova63@mail.ru

The work is devoted to two books on the history of the metro, published in 1935 — “Stories of the builders of the subway” and “How we built the subway”. Both books were created within the framework of the project “The History of factories and plants”, conceived and implemented by M. Gorky. The history of books studied in the article covers extensive materials (fiction, memoirs, epistolary, documentary, etc.) and at the same time is strategically important for the development of the topic of labor in Soviet literature. The problem of the writer's organizational activity aimed at rallying the writing teams working on production collections is touched upon. The sources of information were documents from the Archive of A.M. Gorky (IMLI RAS) and OR IMLI, which are published for the first time. These ego documents provide additional, previously unknown, material for the study of the project “History of factories and plants”, and also allow you to restore individual episodes of the 1930s. All this allows us to conclude that the stated topic is one of the important strategic directions in the study of the literary process of the twentieth century. When studying the problem, a set of methods of source analysis was used, while biographical, memoir, epistolary and other materials served as sources.

Keywords: M. Gorky, “History of factories and plants”, “History of the metro”, L.M. Kaganovich, A. Kosarev, “Stories of metro builders”, “How we built the subway”.