THE STORY OF “THE ROMANTIC TRIP” BY ARKADY GAIDAR AND HIS TALE ABOUT MAGNIT MOUNTAIN

Abstract

The article deals with the selected stories by Nikolai Bogdanov which is called “Gaidar at the Magnit mountain” (1965). By order of RAPP in 1930s Nikolai Bogdanov was working in Magnitka when he met Arkady Gaidar in winter 1931. Arkady Gaidar had been sent to Magnitostroy as a correspondent to the radio paper “Proletariy”. Working with the selected memoir stories that were published at the anniversary of a child writer gives us an opportunity to come back to the one little-known fact in his biography. The article reconstructs the trip and specifies the period of stay in Magnitogorsk. Due to the fact that radio materials that were prepared by Arkady Gaidar are not found, the tale which was told to the children at Atach mountain and which was then published in Nikolai Bogdanov’s collection is still the only story inspired by Magnitka. Its content to this day defines the image of the place, perceived as a text with obvious folkloric roots, as an accidentally found evidence of the archaic history of these places. The analysis of the tale of woe in the article takes into account the late publication of the text, possible editorial revisions on the part of time, memory and artistic objectives of the publisher. The author of the article proposes to focus on the external factors of its appearance, on the cultural and historical conditions in which the text was created. The materials of regional literature give an opportunity to notice the connection of the plot of Arkady Gaidar’s tale with contemporary and subsequent literary interpretations of the place.

Keywords: Arkady Gaidar, Nikolai Bogdanov, radio journalism, space, geographical imagination, context, literary tale, regional literature