Manuscripts by A. M. Volkov as keys to understanding the development of the author’s concept of the fairy tale “The Wizard of the Emerald City”

The article is dedicated to the 85th anniversary of the publication of the first edition of A. M. Volkov’s fairy tale “The Wizard of the Emerald City” (1939). The work uses for the first time the handwritten collection of the children’s writer A.M. Volkov, stored at Tomsk State Pedagogical University. Manuscripts allow one to penetrate into the writer’s workshop, to trace the formation and development of an idea and the course of the creative process. A comparison of the structure of chapters in the 1936 manuscript and the 1939 edition made it possible to identify changes made to the composition (deletion, introduction of new ones, merging chapters). In addition, the article provides fragments of manuscripts from 1936, with which A. Volkov planned to supplement the text, but did not include them in the printed version of 1939. Analysis of the drafts gave an idea of A. Volkov’s work with character names. It was important for the writer to find equivalents to the names in F. Baum’s fairy tale, so that they would be understandable to the Russian-speaking reader and optimally reveal the character’s image. The writer worked on the largest number of name options for Scarecrow. Of particular interest is the manuscript of fragments of A. M. Volkov’s play “Flight to Fairyland” based on “The Wizard of the Emerald City”. The manuscript is introduced into scientific circulation for the first time and commented on. The diary entries of A. Volkov and the unusual image of Goodwin in fragments of the play (a black slave Uncle Joe who escaped from an exploiter) indicate that the writer tried to submit to circumstances, adapt to the requirements of censorship, inscribing a fairy tale plot into the traditions of social literature of the late 19th – first half XX century. However, the incompleteness of the play’s concept can be explained by both external (the onset of the “thaw”) and internal (unwillingness to obey the political situation) reasons. The manuscript of “Flight to Fairytale Land” is published in full in this issue of the magazine.

memorial collection of children’s writer A. M. Volkova, manuscripts, “The Wizard of the Emerald City”, versions of the fairy tale, “Flight to Fairyland”