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Abstract: The article explores the “writer’s questionnaire”, a genre and method of data collection that appeared in the modern era in literary periodicals, which became the basis for the formation of books-collections of questionnaires, representing the writer’s self-reflection in the context of the era’s request in relation to fiction creators. The practical research material for analysis is taken from the collection of questionnaires compiled by F. Fiedler “The First Literary Steps: Autobiographies of Modern Russian Writers” (1911). The narrative approach allows exploring the answers of the writer, i.e. the refraction of the event-driven history of authorship, entry into the “world of writers” in the personal experience of the author at the beginning of the 20th century: the goals of writing, the relationships between the creator and the institutions of the book-making environment (publishers, editors, critics); also a social query (constructing an exhaustive canon of questions), and a “narrative frame” in which the writer finds himself thanks to the specific form of the questionnaire. Writer’s questionnaire is interpreted as one of the first examples of direct interaction between the writer and his readers, which contributed to satisfying the request of the reading public in understanding the sacred nature of literary creativity. The object of the analysis encompasses the issues related to the “ordeal of editorial offices” and the payment for literary labor at the beginning of the young writers’ career, in comparison with social well-being / non-well-being at the time of writing the answers to the questionnaire. The author of the article comes to the conclusion that the “narrative frame” and the detailed answers of the writers in this thematic case demonstrate new norms of interaction within the literary environment between its actors (54 questionnaires of writers of the beginning of the 20th century were analyzed). The writers publicly discuss fees, the symbolic and actual cost of writing, the opportunity to devote themselves entirely to artistic writing, give information about their personal lives, getting the opportunity to focus on certain aspects of their own portrait. Retrospective self-analysis allows the authors to talk about the non-randomness of the path of suffering of the writer, and the mechanisms of turning an ordinary writer into a classical one. Fiedler, taking a culture maker’s position in the literary life of modernity and possessing an ensemble kind of thinking, creates a collection of special narratives formed in the literary professional discourse.

About the author(s) :

Elena A. Selyutina

Chelyabinsk State University (Chelyabinsk, Russia)

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5982-6208

Publication Timeline:

Date of receipt: 30.09.2024; date of publication: 31.10.2025

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