How Demyan Bedny — “a Harmful Man” — Deceived Himself. (on the Creative History of the Epic “Rock Formation”)

The article is devoted to two episodes from the life of Demyan Bedny. The first is connected with the once popular book by S.Z. Fedorchenko “The People at War” — the author’s text, which the poet took for a folklore source. Demyan Bedny made a similar mistake shortly before his death, while working on the epic “The Rock Formation”, today almost forgotten by both readers and researchers of the poet’s work. It is a verse arrangement of the Ural tales of P.P. Bazhov. The article restores the path to the poet’s realization that in the case of the Ural tales, he was dealing not with workers’ folklore, but with a literary author’s text. It is because of this that the tales, arranged in verse, were never published during Demyan Bedny’s lifetime. Only after the poet’s death did his son publish the full version of the collection. The article publishes for the first time archival documents, telling about the author’s work on this text and about the publication of the full text of the epic by the poet’s son.