Spiridon Drozhzhin’ literary self-reflection: Based on Tver State University Scientific Library collections

Annotated research is focused on the modern reconstruction of Spiridon Drozhzhin’s creative personality. Understanding his personality as a folk poet requires the systematization of all available creative and autobiographical materials and the formation of literary and documentary base to identify the features of his literary and vital self-reflection. The foundation of this base is the Drozhzhin’s Collected Works (2015), but it needs to be replenished with marginal auto-testimonies. Today such auto-testimonies (author’s notes, edits, comments) are not actually described. The material of the research is the author's notes, found in Drozhzhin's lifetime collections in the Rare Books Department of the Tver State University Scientific Library: “Poems. 1866–1888” (1907), “Bayan” (1909), “Peasant’s Songs” (1929). Biographical, historical-literary, comparative and cross-cultural approaches are used. The subject of the study is not only the actual notes, but also the poet's choice of specific texts for self-editing and the form of his literary self-reflection. As a result of the study, the author introduces Drozhzhin’s notes in the indicated publications into a scientific circulation. The content of these notes is described: overcoming of metaphorical rhetoric, correlating artistic ideas of poetry with social history and folk views on life. The article demonstrates the evolution of Drozhzhin's forms of artistic self-reflection as a movement from traditional self-editing to the creation of an auto-myphological poetic space in which its manifestations were realized as a chronicler of folk life, an observer of social change and an insightful seer. Conclusions are drawn that Drozhzhin's literary self-reflection has essential features of folk views on life: rejection of self-sacrifice and approval of prolonged spiritual and moral service to society, rejection of the violent transformation of reality and protection of evolutionary forms of social life.