THE UNPUBLISHED “TRANSPORT COLLECTION” OF THE MOSCOW ASSOCIATION OF PROLETARIAN WRITERS AS A FACT OF SOVIET LITERATURE (BASED ON ARCHIVAL MATERIALS OF THE DEPARTMENT OF MANUSCRIPTS OF A.M. GORKY INSTITUTE OF WORLD LITERATURE)

In 1930, as part of a campaign to recruit udarniks to literature, the Moscow Association of Proletarian Writers (MAPW) organized literary brigades on transport. On the pages of the literary magazine On the Literary Post ( Na literaturnom postu - the magazine of Marxist criticism), information about the activities of transport brigades was regularly posted. The fruits of the work of grassroots writers was to be the socalled “Transport Collection”, which was compiled by railway construction workers and MAPW members. The collection was never published, although it was typed in the publishing house Federation (Federaciya). A version of the set with editorial corrections is stored in the MAPW fund of the Department of Manuscripts at A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The book is interesting today as a characteristic example of the grassroots writers’ work. The mass writers studied in the literary groups under the guidance of MAPW members, belonging to the literary era called the “proletarian episode” of Soviet literature. The article analyzes the author’s interpretations of the concepts of “mass”, “individuality”, “hero” and “antagonist” formed by studying in the MAPW literary groups. An attempt has been made to establish the reasons for the failure of the publication on the eve of the literary organizations’ dissolution and largescale changes in railway transport carried out by the People’s Commissariat of Communication Routes of the Soviet Union during the second five-year plan.