The dynamic poetics of Ivan Shmelev’s story “The Small Shelf” (from a manuscript to the printed text)

In the archive of Shmelev’s documents are kept the materials of two versions of the story “The Small Shelf” (1909). Their comparative analysis allows disclosing the genesis of the artistic structure of the writing. The first draft is structured around the characters of a teenage boy and his boss, an old man obsessed with the hunger for power. The old man is striving to subject the boy spiritually and possess him like a thing. This is the core of the psychological conflict of the work. The character of the old man has the features of the image of the Baron in A. S. Pushkin’s tragedy “The Miserly Knight”. The motif of the “power of gold” is transformed into the “power of knowledge” in the story. The idea of the first edition to show a spiritual crisis of a contemporary obsessed with aspiration for knowledge and power was not implemented in the final edition of the work. In the second edition the author showed the idea of the story through the affirmation of a transformative power of knowledge. He complicates a narrative structure of the text, changes the images of the main characters and transforms the idea of spiritual obedience into the idea of spiritual kinship in which appear evangelistic connotations. The author contrasts the main characters to “patronymic” ambience under the principle of binary opposition such as the “spiritual — materialistic”, the “learned man and the man obsessed with thirst for profit”.