N. G. Chernyshevsky

To the centenary of the education in humanities at Saratov University

For the first time the documents are published and commented on which shed light on the assistance that a Saratov university literary scholar E. I. Pokusaev rendered to a famous out-of-favor director of a Moscow Taganka Theatre Yu. L. Lyubimov in staging the performance on N. G. Chernyshevsky’s novel What Is to Be done?

The article views the letters of A. P. Skaftymov to N. M. Chernyshevskaya of the 1920-1940s from the N. G. Chernyshevskiy museum stock. Different connections of the two scientists are covered, the details of A. P. Skaftymov’s studying the life and creative works of N. G. Chernyshevskiy, his participation in the activities of the museum, that in those years was a certain center of developing and promoting the writer’s literary heritage. 

The article discusses the fate and some characteristic traits of the personality, as well as controversial issues of N. G. Chernyshevsky’s biography, uncovered in the forgotten book by L. B. Kamenev Chernyshevsky (1933), an insightful phenomenon of the Soviet humanities of the 1930s, which allows us to relate the moral experience and the tragedy of the revolutionary Democrat, the deep sense of his aesthetics and ethics to the problems of the Soviet reality the 1920–1930s.