“CALLING UP BIANKI’S SPIRIT” (BASED ON CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN MIKHAIL ZVEREV AND NIKOLAY SLADKOV)

Abstract

The article is dedicated to a review of the literary and personal communication of Soviet nature writers in the 1960s and 1980s. V. Bianki was the inspirer and literary teacher of this writing community, and his students were Leningrad authors who wrote about nature. V. Bianki referred to N. Sladkov as his heir in literature. The correspondence between N. Sladkov and the Kazakh naturalist writer M. Zverev provides material for the analysis of the artistic and philosophical attitudes of the authors who ranked themselves among the literary school of V. Bianki and also allows to understand not only the personal relationship between the correspondents but also the phenomenon of the Soviet writer-naturalist. In setting themselves in opposition to amateur amateurs, “naturalists” insisted on the need to combine scientific authenticity with artistic imagery, seeing this as the specificity of natural history literature. Another important part of the identity of “naturalists” was participation in biological fieldwork, which allowed collecting material for literary work. The artistic program of the Leningrad naturalists was contradictory: in some ways, it inherited Bianki’s naturalist concept and literary method, and in other ways it challenged them. However, the circle of Bianki’s followers took on the role of unquestionable experts in the field of novelty naturalistic prose for children.

Keywords: prirodniki, naturalist writers, Vitaliy Bianki, nature study tales, Nikolay Sladkov, Mikhail Zverev