Issues of the ecology of historical and cultural territories of Nizhny Novgorod in the context of the formation of literary regional studies
Authors:   Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Gogolev Roman A. 
Published: December 2024

The article examines the formation of Nizhny Novgorod literary regionalism and its impact on the ecosystem of the urban cultural environment of the late 19th – early 20th centuries. The author considers that a distinctive feature of the 1920s, when the methodological base of local history was strengthened, is the presence of not only a large number of local history enthusiasts, but also a state order. Particular attention is paid to the contribution of Aleksandr Svobodov and the Gorky Literary Museum in Nizhny Novgorod to the forming of the city’s new sacral toponymy. The work of local historians not only harmonized the transformation of the urban identity from a “pocket of Russia” to a “Russian Detroit”, but also partly predetermined the format of the new agglomeration, which was named Gorky. The repression of the local history movement in the USSR in 1929–1930 halted and in some ways reversed the incorporation of the older generation of intellectuals, who were initially cautious of the new government, into the socialist society they were building. Their spontaneous rapprochement, against the background of a shared interest with the proletariat in the history and culture of the local area, collapsed as the authorities did not plan to tolerate the prospect of the old “specialists” returning to the leading positions in society. Literary local history, which served as a means of harmonizing relationships between different societies, made an attempt to form a new mass urban culture in the 1920s through scientific research and the creation of a system of specialized institutions (libraries, museums, local history associations, and excursion bureaus). This process was supported by the parallel distribution of free multi-stage education, including in the field of art – music and art schools and colleges. With the advent of the first proper Soviet generation of cultural workers, the involvement of “old specialists” in cultural construction was stopped, and many of them were repressed. The inertia of the local history movement turned out to be small: the second half of the 1930s was marked by the destruction of many objects of cultural heritage. The spontaneous destruction of estates in the early years of Soviet power was replaced by a policy of targeted destruction of architectural monuments of ancient Russian (primarily church) art, necropolises, renaming of historical streets and entire settlements. From the late 1920s to the 1950s, literary regionalism survived largely thanks to the personality of Maxim Gorky. Only by referring to the Nizhny Novgorod period of the writer’s biography (1868–1904) researchers gained relative freedom and were not suspected of being disloyal to the existing political regime. Currently, one of the significant resources of literary local history – the urban development of the historical center of the city and Old Kanavino – is on the verge of extinction. This can be prevented by giving Nizhny Novgorod the status of a historical settlement.