Yuri Nikolaevich Chumakov’s Last Notebook

Yuri Nikolaevich Chumakov (1922–2015) is best known for his works on Pushkin, Tyutchev, and the Onegin tradition in Russian poetry. His scholarly interests, however, extended far beyond 19th-century Russian literature. In 2010, his last book, “Towards a Lyrical Plot” (Moscow, 2010). After its publication, this book continued to live in his mind, and in his workbook, which he always kept at hand (more than twenty such notebooks have survived, not to mention his notebooks), notes appeared that serve as a spontaneous continuation of it. We decided to publish this notebook from 2012–2014. In it, in addition to poetry and philosophical fragments on the author's favorite themes, such as part and whole, singularity, the point extending to all, and so on, the reader will find notes on the prose of I. Bunin, the lyric poetry of B. Pasternak, and memoir and poetry sketches.