Vladimir Varshavsky (1906, Moscow – 1978, Geneve) is
widely known as a historian and a thinker, who explored the complex cultural phenomenon of the first wave of Russian emigration in a documentary book “Unnoticed generation” (1956, new edition – 2010). His autobiographical novel “Expectation” (1972), a bright work of Russian existentialism prose, is less known. Varshavsky appears in this unusual novel, which is based on the facts of real life, as a “man of History”. It was History that first made him an emigrant – a marginal person, but then during World War II it returned him back to it’s highway: an extreme situation (war against Nazism, captivity) revived his unrealized personal potential and became a catalyst in the process of his becoming a writer.
Keywords
Russian emigration of the first wave; history and writer; France; World War II; philosophy of personalism; Russian existentialist lite- rature.
For citation
Krasavchenko, T.N. “Russian Émigré on the Waves of History: Vladimir Varshavsky and his Novel ‘Expectation’”. Literaturo- vedcheskii zhurnal, 2023, no. 2(60), pp. 170–189. (In Russ.) DOI: 10.31249/litzhur/2023.60.10