MOSCOW, 15 November (BelTA) – A BelTA reporter was the first journalist to get access to an unpublished student copybook of poet Maxim Bogdanovich. The BelTA reporter was able to make a photo of it at the A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences. This copybook contains poetry translated by the poet from Belarusian to Russian. More than that, one of the poems was likely to be written by Maxim Bogdanovich himself, though it had never seen the light before.
“Yes, you are the first journalist whom we show this copybook. No one has physically seen it before, except for a handful of scholars and archive employees of the institute,” Deputy Director of the A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature Darya Moskovskaya confirmed during an interview.
According to Darya Moskovskaya, after the copybook was discovered, its photo copies were sent to Belarusian colleagues in Minsk who take part in a joint research project “Gorky-Bogdanovich”. “The project will conclude with a book that will contain unpublished correspondence between the families of Maxim Gorky and Maxim Bogdanovich. This book will see the light by the yearend with financial support of the Union State Standing Committee. If not for this project timed to the 150th anniversary of Maxim Gorky, it is unknown when the copybook would be discovered,” she said.
Thanks to this book, all lovers of Maxim Bogdanovich' poetry will be able to see the poet's copybook. “We will attach its facsimile copy into the book to be published as part of the Gorky-Bogdanovich project,” Darya Moskovskaya said.
An electronic copy of the copybook is to be transferred to the Maxim Bogdanovich Literature Museum in Minsk. Darya Moskovskaya did not rule out a possibility to give the original to Belarus temporarily for exhibition purposes.
