“Foreigners in a foreign land”: a historical context of “Strangers” from E. Chirikov’s “Essays on provincial life”

Written at the turn of the 19th– 20th centuries, Evgeny Chirikov’s novel “Strangers”, reflecting the realities of provincial life, received an impressive number of critical reviews from the author’s contemporaries. However, decades later, critics took a different look at the work of E. Chirikov. The article examines the historical context of the novel created by the writer, searches for real prototypes of the characters depicted by the author, authentic events that served as a source of inspiration for Chirikov; as a result, the position of the writer’s contemporary critics is questioned. We have established that several episodes of the Samara “newspaper battles” of the 1880s – 1890s were taken as the basis for the plot development in the story “Strangers” by E. Chirikov, the main episode was the short “Marxist” period of “The Samara Vestnik”. We suggest that, while depicting Samara and Samara Messenger on the pages of the story, the author of “Strangers” did not copy the reality, recreating it in the way required by the laws of creating an artistic image. Finally, we prove that when creating the images of individual characters in “Strangers”, the writer acted in at least three different ways: “copying” the characters from real prototypes, “splitting” the prototypes into different characters, and finally, combining several real figures into one character.