The phenomenon of Evdokia Nagrodskaya and her return to the modern reader

ST. PETERSBURG. In the framework of the independent publishing project Common place, a monograph by Maria Mikhailova and Yin Liu on Evdokia Nagrodskaya was published.

The name of Evdokia Nagrodskaya is almost unknown to the modern reader, although we are talking about one of the most popular writers of the beginning of the last century. Her novel “The Wrath of Dionysus” was the main bestseller of the 1910s. The name of the mother of Nagrodskaya, Avdotya Panaeva, is known even to schoolchildren due to the meticulousness with which the biographies of famous writers are understood in the framework of the curriculum. For almost 20 years, Panaeva was a muse, co-author and common-law wife of Nikolai Nekrasov. In her Memoirs, she talked about meetings and conversations with Herzen, Tolstoy, Dobrolyubov, Turgenev, Belinsky, Saltykov-Shchedrin, Dobrolyubov.

The father of Evdokia, a publicist and critic Apollo Golovachev, was a secretary and one of the authors of the legendary literary magazine Sovremennik. In his printing house, the works of Darwin, Sechenov, and Mill were published in Russian. One of the Golovachev brothers, Victor, was a maritime historian. The other is Adrian, a zoologist. The third - Gregory - as an editor and poet.

Evdokia Nagrodskaya is one of those feminist writers who gained recognition in the first third of the twentieth century. Such as Anastasia Verbitskaya, author of "Keys to Happiness" and "Little Shops." Or Tatyana Krasnopolskaya-Shenfeld, the author of the novel “Over Love” about the history of the stray dog cabaret and its famous patrons. Many talented poets of the Silver Age also made a vivid statement about themselves during this period: Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Gippius, Benar, Guro, Schwarzbach-Molchanova, Inber, Lokhvitskaya, Odoevtseva. Member of the liberal movement, writer, translator, critic Maria Moravskaya believed that confessional verses gave women the opportunity to express all their intimate, and this brought them liberation.

The talented, ironic, paradoxical, sensual prose of Nagrodsky appealed to many. The total circulation of her bestseller “The Wrath of Dionysus”, which tells about the journey of a young widow from St. Petersburg to the Caucasus and a passionate romance with a fellow traveler, amounted to 25 thousand copies. The printing house of Mikhail Nikolaevich Semenov, the nephew of the famous traveler Semenov-Tian-Shansky, reprinted the book 10 times. Subsequently, her new novels, collections of short stories, and poems came out. The ban on censorship and confiscation of the circulation of the novel “The Bronze Door”, rumors of her “metaphysical apartment” with “living” furniture only fueled interest in the literary work of Nagrodskaya.

The main reason for the almost century-old oblivion of Evdokia Nagrodskaya is emigration, which automatically deleted it from the list of writers approved by the new government. The same fate befell many of those who, like her, left their homeland after the 1917 revolution. Participation in the Masonic movement, frankness of works, sympathy for the idea of “free love” were an additional argument in favor of the prohibition of her work in Russia.

One of the most interesting sections of the monograph “Creativity of the mistress of the“ bad apartment, ”or Phenomenon E. A. Nagrodskaya” is devoted to comparing Nagrodskaya’s novel “He” with Bulgakov’s works: “Morphine” and “The Master and Margarita”. Textological coincidences, the similarity of names, the mentioned objects and circumstances, plot roll calls confirm the acquaintance of Mikhail Afanasevich with the work of a talented writer.

An independent publishing project Common place has been operating since 2013 due to the enthusiasm of volunteers working for free. The publishing portfolio includes classics and non-fiction.

Elena Tanakova © Gallerix.ru