Glory to you, my hard life!": Life and creative peripetias of the fate of the neo-peasant writer P. I. Karpov

Abstract

The research objective is to address the issue of the accuracy of biographical data regarding P. I. Karpov. The article discusses the stages in the life and creative path of the little-known writer of the neo-peasant direction, P. I. Karpov, with attention given to the features of the author's idiolect. An important aspect of this study is uncovering unreliable information about the writer, who is one of the enigmatic and contradictory figures in the 20th-century literature. P. I. Karpov's literary works were banned by censorship for 25 years, many of them were confiscated. The true extent of Karpov's work remains unknown to literary critics to this day. The scientific novelty of the research lies in introducing the reliable information about the life and works of P. I. Karpov for the first time, confirmed by documentary evidence, newspaper interviews with the writer's relatives, archived in the Literary Museum of the city of Kursk. The research revealed that P. I. Karpov largely mythologized his own biography, influenced by several non-literary factors that significantly impacted the writer's fate.