Essays and Short Stories From Nikolai Naumov’s Collection Strength Breaks the Straw in the Context of the Tchaikovtsy Ideas
The collection Strength Breaks the Straw, published in St. Petersburg in 1874 by the Circle of Tchaikovsky, marked the heyday of the literary work of Nikolai Ivanovich Naumov, a Siberian writer and official. The works of this collection were originally published in leading democratic journals of this period and later entered the pantheon of populist fiction and won the attention of many contemporaries and researchers in the future. A relevant aspect in the study of Naumov’s creative heritage of the first half of the 1870s, i.e. the mentioned collection, is the understanding of the mutual influence of the various social fields he was engaged in during these years sequentially or in parallel and, accordingly, of his various institutional activities closely connected with literary ones, in particular, with the aesthetics and poetics of the collection. The article explores the mechanisms of influence of these various social fields on Naumov’s literary activities during this period. It reveals the poetic and aesthetic features of the works of the collection caused by the historical and literary trends, by the ideological influence of populism, and by Naumov’s own tasks as a Siberian writer and official. The analysis showed that the features of the works are caused not only by the main trends of populist ideology and fiction, but also by the tasks that Naumov tried to solve in the course of his institutional activities. His works of the first half of the 1870s, which the Tchaikovtsy used to spread their ideology, aimed at satisfying the demands of the mass reader and also at creating his “ideal” reader, which regionalists sought from Naumov. The exceptional documentary nature creating a “reality effect” and directly related to the author’s ubiquitous voice permeating the structure of each essay was a means for Naumov to form the reader’s reception, primarily that of a reader from people and from Siberia. On the other hand, the documentary nature of Naumov’s essays is caused not only by the trends associated with the flourishing of realism and the search for means of transmission of the truth of life in fiction, but also by the writer’s previous public service, which provided him with rich factual material and influenced the nature of its presentation in literature. This mutual influence was largely supported by the fact that, in the considered period, Naumov occupied homologous positions in various social fields.