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‘Never write anything that humiliates your homeland…’ A. Kuprin’s interviews in the 1920s’ foreign press
https://doi.org/10.31425/0042-8795-2025-5-13-38
Abstract
The article enriches scholarly discourse with A. Kuprin’s hitherto unstudied 1920s interviews with foreign journalists. In the publication’s introduction, N. Melnikov analyzes the genre-specific features and varieties of interviews. Interviews can, on the one hand, indicate the writer’s popularity, providing, on the other hand, a setting for the author’s self-presentation — a way to reaffirm his image with readership, promote his literary tastes, and share his ethical and political creed. Kuprin’s interviews in foreign languages are a brilliant example of the hybrid genre of the ‘interview essay,’ with a significantly reduced question-answer part. At the centre of such interviews are the interviewer and his description of the interviewee, his dwelling, and oeuvre, with infrequent inclusions of the interviewee’s direct speech. Nevertheless, such unauthorized interviews are of significant interest because they add new and curious nuances to the writer’s image, communicated from an unusual viewpoint of a perceptive and benevolent foreign interlocutor.
About the Author
N. G. Melnikov
Lomonosov Moscow State University
Russian Federation
Russian Federation
Nikolay G. Melnikov, Candidate of Philology
119991; 1 Leninskie Gory; Moscow
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Review
For citations:
Melnikov N.G. ‘Never write anything that humiliates your homeland…’ A. Kuprin’s interviews in the 1920s’ foreign press. Voprosy literatury. 2025;(5):13-38. (In Russ.) https://doi.org/10.31425/0042-8795-2025-5-13-38
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