Письмо Анны Васильевны Гоголь Владимиру Ивановичу Шенроку

Вестник Московского университета. Серия 9: Филология. 2022. № 5. С. 193–204.

Lifshits A.

The article is devoted to a letter found in a volume from the collection of the Scientific Library of Moscow State University. Ten small editions and offprints dedicated to Gogol were enclosed in one binding at the beginning of the 20th century. As a result of the analysis of the content, it was possible to establish the author and the addressee of the message, as well as the date and circumstances of its writing. Nikolai Gogol’s sister Anna responds to the writer’s biographer Vladimir Shenrok aft er receiving a magazine with his article “Gogol’s Parents” (1889). The letter contains previously unknown facts about the writer’s relatives: household nicknames, the name of the writer’s aunt’s husband, etc. The letter shows that there was a correspondence between Shenrock and Anna Gogol: the writer’s sister acts as a keeper of family memory, helps the biographer in collecting materials, notes inaccuracies and errors in his work. Anna Vasilievna remembers many details of past life, which seem important to her, but not to her correspondent: Shenrock sometimes refrains from correcting obvious mistakes in his opus. Th e article also touches upon the history of the letter getting into the book. Th e biographer’s son, Aleksey Shenrok, worked at the Moscow University library in the 1920s and probably put the letter in the book in the hope that one day the letter would be found by the reader. The letter is published with detailed comments.

Keywords: история науки, Nikolai Gogol, история Московского университета, Н.В. Гоголь, History of Science, биография писателя, writer's biography, Anna Vasilievna Gogol, V.I. Shenrock, history of Moscow University, Анна Васильевна Гоголь, В. И. Шенрок

Publication based on the results of: Semiotic of literary and vernacular text: Slavic world between East and West (2022)