“Between romanticism and realism”: Vasily Avenarius in search of self-identity
Authors:   Institute of Philology of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Kozlov Alexey E. 
Published: December 2024

The article analyzes the literary reputation and career of Vasily Avenarius. Coming from a family of Russian Germans and having received a good education at home, Avenarius graduated from the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of St. Petersburg University with a Candidate of Sciences degree, after which he completed an internship in Germany. The article examines Avenarius’ dilogy Wandering Forces (1865–1867): its style and form in the aspect of secondaryness and alternativeness, as well as its plot considered from a typological perspective. Having first appeared on the literary stage as a poet, an epigone of Pushkin, Lermontov, Benediktov and Heine, Avenarius fully declared himself as the author of the Wandering Forces: Modern Idyll (1865) published in Otechestvennye Zapiski went practically unnoticed by criticism, while the second part Plague (1867) published in Vsemirny Trud caused a flurry of negative reviews from liberals and conservatives. The article presents negative reviews from Nikolai Shelgunov and Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, and also examines the controversy with Nikolai Leskov, whose novel Nowhere largely determined the poetics of Avenarius himself. Nevertheless, Leskov demonstrated an attempt to distance himself from both his “talentless student” and the magazine that published his work. The two stories, combined into the dilogy Wandering Forces, determined Avenarius’ fame as a “clubber” and “erotomaniac” not much different from nihilistic deniers. Seeing possible risks for social reputation, Avenarius, who combined literary activities with service in the department all his life, not only reworked these texts, excluding many scandalous details from them, but also changed the reference point, first choosing the model of unbiased narration developed by Lermontov’s epigones (primarily Vasily Sollogub and Mikhail Avdeev), and later choosing the least dangerous and not requiring serious creative success in the field of children’s literature and popular biography. Thus, Avenarius found himself in historical and biographical
fiction, perhaps the first to lay the foundations of popular Pushkin literature, replicating stories from the life of the classics and presenting them for the reading of young people. The article ends with an analysis of contemporary reviews: the researcher of children’s literature Marietta Chudakova and the popularizer of Russian fiction Timofey Prokopov. It is shown that cultural revision is often associated with the exclusion of inconvenient literary facts from the biography of a forgotten writer. The task of the researcher (Chudakova) is directly opposite to the pragmatics of the popularizer (Prokopov) – it requires the restoration and ordering of all links in the reconstruction of the career of a fiction writer and the positivist verification of the available data when including them in the general context of the time. The movement from a plot to another plot, from a topic to another topic indicates the compromise nature of Avenarius’ work and at the same time demonstrates identifiable strategies, the classification of which can bring the researcher closer to studying the behavior pattern of an average fiction writer.