The unknown facts from the creation's history of I. S. Shmelev's story "To the Sun" (the experience of textological reading)

Abstract

The article presents for the first time observations on the creative history of the I. S. Shmelev's children story “To the Sun”. For the writer it's became a kind of symbolic "way out" of the current ideological crisis during his stay in Vladimir in the year of the First Russian Revolution. Based on the analysis of the manuscript stored in the RSL (F. No. 387), its codicological and textological descriptions, two editions and versions of the story were identified, their genealogy, ideological, eidological, narrative, stylistic discrepancies were established. As the comparison of sources convinces, in the course of working on the text, I S. Shmelev changes accents - from an external plot to a symbolic plan. In this regard, replaces the less expressive title of the story “The Crane” to the metaphorical with subtext “To the Sun”, draws deeper the image of the protagonist, endowing it with individual characteristics, complicates the semantics and structure of images of nature, depriving them of specificity and making them more generalized, introduces a poetic refrain. Due to the amendment, the text acquires a high level of philosophical generalization, which in turn, allows the crane to expand the private history to the history of a person who turned out to be in a similar situation, and the story about the reunion of the crane with his flock the struggle and choice of opposing principles (freedom and circumstances) in human existence, the search for oneself. Due to the two-sidedness, the plot of the children's text thus acquires signs of universality and timelessness.