A bouts-rimés novel in Russian fiction of the 1910s: phenomenology, authors’ intentions and sociocultural context

The collective adventure-science fiction novels Three Letters (1911) and The Devil’s Dozen (1918) started the history of bouts-rimés prose in Russian fiction. The current article presents the first attempt in Russian literary criticism to interpret this phenomenon in the sociocultural context of the era and reveal its phenomenology, the main features (including the genre ones) of each of the novels. An unusual experiment combined very different writers: classical (or almost classical) ones – A. Kuprin, A. Averchenko, F. Sologub; “tough professionals” - I. Yasinsky, N. Teffi, A. Izmailov and others, and those writers who are considered to be suppliers of “tabloid fiction” – P. Gnedich, A. Zarin and others. The article focuses on the history of the creation of works, the authors’ intentions, the contribution of each of the co-authors, the reasons for the failure of the projects.