LITERARY EXPERIENCE OF THE URAL CUTTER AND FORESTER IVAN GAGARIN: SCHOOL READING IN WRITING PRACTICE

Abstract

The article analyses the manuscript of the Ural cutter and forester Ivan Gagarin “Selected memories from my life” written by him in the late 1940s. The writing practice of a non-professional writer is analyzed in the context of the history and culture of the metallurgical Ural district, drawing on folklore, literary material, and materials on the education development of Orenburg Governorate. As a result, the manuscript, although it contains memoirs of a biographical nature, is defined as a collection of stories that tell the readers about the craft tricks of a forester, an avid hunter, and fisherman. The author of the article found some overlaps between Ivan Gagarin’s writings and professional literature narrations, and these allow us to describe the techniques of incorporating literary material into the text. In his prose, the borrowings (such as descriptive phrases, and lines of well-known poetry) are incorporated into the structure of sentences and assume appropriate grammatical forms. For poetic endings of the calendar sketches, Ivan Gagarin changed the poems of Nikolai Nekrasov, Alexey Plescheev, Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, Mikhail Chehov. The edits are as follows: the author eliminated the patterns that were alien to him and included those of his everyday life; he rearranged the verses in the sequence he needed, and added his own descriptive material. Ivan Gagarin does not mean to destroy his poetic origins. As an illiterate composer looking for opportunities to express his thought accurately, he did not count on the success of his own poetry, represented in the text of the manuscript by the genre form folk rhymes.

Keywords: folklore, literature, unprofessional writer, literature experience, personal literature practice, school reading