Forgotten Names of Russian Emigration. Some details on Veniamin Korsak-Zavadsky’s Biography

Abstract

This paper is the first in a series of publications dedicated to some issues related to reconstructing the literary biography of Veniamin Valerianovich Korsak (real surname: Zavadsky), a little-known writer of the first wave of Russian emigration. The relevance of the work is determined by the difficulty of understanding Korsak’s creative legacy without knowing his biography, since the documentary element is the main component of all his works. However, the lack of a systematic scientific systematic analysis of the creative and epistolary heritage of the writer, along with confusion arising from some obscurities and inaccuracies, all this makes it difficult to study the poetics of ego-documents in his books. To fill these gaps, the paper summarizes the results of the search and analysis of materials on the life and works of the writer and his wife, N.A. Dobrovolskaya- Zavadskaya, in Russian and foreign archives (State Archive of the Russian Federation, Central State Historical Archive of St. Petersburg, The Bakhmeteff Archive, the Hoover Institution Library & Archives, Getty Research Institute, Lilly Library, The National Archives of France). The article introduces archival documents related to the pre-war period in the biography of Korsak, as well as a part of his correspondence held in the collections of A.M. Remizov, A.V. Amfiteatrov, V.P. Kulaev, and T.S. Varsher. The research reconstructs episodes from the writer’s life in Egypt, France, Italy, and Estonia, and his literary connections with Russian representatives abroad. An attempt to compile a comprehensive bibliography of Korsak’s publications in émigré periodicals enables us to define more precisely the beginning of his literary career.