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News

The Project “Readers’ Letters to M.A.Sholokhov” Received the State Support

In April of 2016, a group of researchers of the A.M.Gorky Institute of the World Literature and the National M.A.Sholokhov Museum-Reserve received a grant of the Russian Humanitarian Fund number 16-04-00166a for preparation of a collective work “Readers’ Letters to M.A.Sholokhov: 1930–1970s”.The work will be a scientific edition of readers’ letters of responses mostly to the literary texts by M.A.Sholokhov with a necessary commentary explaining the principles of the textological selection and publication of responses.

The proposed collective work will be based on the combination of biographical, comparative-historical, historical-functional, social-cultural, psychological and other methodological principles, which guarantee an objective historical evaluation of the literary texts. Such a comprehensive approach will enable a more profound study in the works by M.A.Sholokhov and will completely reveal the interaction of the work and the reader as the two powerful semantic structures.

The book will comprise a big number of the first published materials from the Moscow archives and collections of the Museum-Reserve of M.A.Sholokhov. The work will be illustrated with rare photographs from the museum collection.

The relevance of the research problem is due to the increased public interest in recent years for the history of Russian literature of the XX century and for the selection of the reader’s perception of a separate text or a group of texts as an individual topic.

The study in the reader’s problem through the prism of perception of the texts by M.A.Sholokhov will enable a formation of a theoretical basis for a further construction of some other in-depth studies providing an opportunity of speaking about the genre specifics of the readers’ response and about a special cultural and historical type of the recipient personality with a certain character of the world perception, and others.

The study in a special position of the work by M.A.Sholokhov in the XX century literary process and its influence on the literature of the next century will have a great scientific importance in the resolution of the problem stated.

The work conditioned by the grant is intended for three years (2016–2018).

Olga Bystrova