Issues

The article examines the history of one of the largest unrealized projects of “Literaturnoe nasledstvo” — the so-called Slavic volume (“Russian Literature and the Foreign Slavic World”), which was in preparation from 1970 to 1975. The focus is on the Czech materials of the volume: the editorial correspondence with Czechoslovak academic institutions and individual scholars, the history of assembling the contributors, and the evolution of the thematic concept of the Czech section. Drawing on archival documents from the “Literaturnoe nasledstvo” fonds at the manuscript department of IWL, the article reconstructs the preparation of the volume: from the first contacts with the Institute of Languages and Literature of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences in 1970 to the final decision to abandon the project in 1976. Particular attention is paid to the political context — the consequences of the events of 1968 for Soviet-Czechoslovak scholarly relations and the way the normalization policy affected the composition of the Czech contributors. The article also analyzes the institutional conditions that gave rise to the project: the role of IWL and its Department of Socialist Literatures, as well as the Institute of Slavic and Balkan Studies of the USSR Academy of Sciences, as the key centers for the study of Russian-Slavic literary relations in the 1960s – 1970s. The article argues that the project’s failure stemmed from a fundamental contradiction between the editorial model of Literaturnoe nasledstvo“Literaturnoe nasledstvo” — oriented toward introducing new archival sources into scholarly circulation — and the ideologically prescribed framework for selecting material, which prevented the formation of a volume meeting the publication’s scholarly standards.