THE DON THEME IN THE CREATIVE BIOGRAPHY OF R.P. KUMOVA: POETICS, HISTORICAL CONTEXT

The article examines the role of the Don theme in the creative heritage of R. P. Kumov (1883–1919), who was perceived by pre-revolutionary criticism as the “Don Chekhov”. His pre-revolutionary works, with the exception of the early story “Hegumen Joseph”, were not connected with the Don. It was not until the events of the 1917 revolution and Civil War that the Don theme became the main one in the writer’s work. The stories and essays from 1917–1919, published in the anti-Bolshevik press, form an independent artistic cycle. They are considered in an actual historical context, which gave rise to the formation of the Ust-Medveditsky literary circle, which active member Kumov was. The poetics of the works included in the cycle is focused on Cossack folklore, and above all, on the genre traditions of historical and religious legends, and full of motifs and images of folk eschatology. Two essays and a prose poem are devoted to a direct reflection of specific historical events on the Don. But even in them, the lyrical principle prevails over the journalistic, the tragedy of the fratricidal civil war is as sessed from the standpoint of Christian humanism. The writer’s early death in February 1919 was perceived over the Don as a loss on a national scale. The article collects and analyzes responses to it in the Don press, making it possible to see how this event influenced the retrospective perception of Kumov’s work as a national writer of the Don and a classic of Don literature. It enables identifying new facets of the actual scientific problem of the correlation of the national and the regional in local literary texts and clarifying the place and scale of Kumov’s work in the history of Russian literature of the first decades of the 20th century.