The most famous literary hoaxes that history knows. Literary hoaxes with Russian roots (literary-historical miniature)

Thirty years ago, experts and archival workers determined that Adolf Hitler's sensational personal diaries turned out to be a fake. However, this is far from the only hoax that has affected literature, both fiction and non-fiction. Here are the most famous deceptions that have denigrated the history of world literature since the Middle Ages.

The Fuhrer's personal diaries

In 1983, the Stern newspaper published an article about a unique find - 60 small notebooks, which are the personal diaries of Adolf Hitler from the formation of his party in the 30s until the end of World War II. The newspaper paid journalist Gerd Heidemann, who discovered the diaries (in the supposedly crashed plane), a fortune. As soon as fragments of the diaries were published and presented to the German archive workers for review, it turned out that the entries were not only forged, but also extremely crudely forged - the Fuhrer’s handwriting was not similar, pieces of text were stolen from previously published materials, and the paper and ink turned out to be too modern. The fate of the fortune received for the diaries is unknown, but Heidemann and his accomplice were convicted and sent to prison.

The story of Little Tree, a Cherokee orphan boy

The story of a Cherokee orphan who survived a poor childhood under the care of his grandparents was first published in 1976. Presented as a memoir, the story received praise from critics and readers and began to be studied in schools. The first edition sold 9 million copies. In 1991, it turned out that the author of the book was not Forest Carter, but Asa Carter, a famous member of the Ku Klux Klan and ally of George Wallace. Wallace's famous racist line, "Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, and segregation always," was written by Carter. Not only the name of the author turned out to be a fiction, but also the language and culture of the Cherokee tribe, the descriptions of which were criticized by its true representatives.

The Last Adventures of the King of the Wild Lands

The legendary officer, traveler and politician Davy Crockett became the hero of myths and co-author of his own biography. However, pride of place in this list is occupied by a short description of his last adventures before his death during the defense of the Alamo fortress. The prologue to the book states that the events were copied directly from personal diary Colonel Crockett, which only contributed to the establishment of his status folk hero and legendary Texas quarterback. Published immediately after Crockett's death, the book became very popular. In 1884, it turned out that the adventure's author, Richard Penn Smith, wrote it in just 24 hours, consulting historical documents, oral legends and his own imagination.

In 1794, William Henry Ireland, the son of publisher and Shakespeare fan Samuel Ireland, presented his father with a unique paper - a mortgage letter signed by the hand of William Shakespeare himself. The shocked father was full of delight, because to this day few documents written by the master’s hand have survived. The younger Ireland announced that he had discovered the document in a friend’s collection and subsequently provided many more documents authored by Shakespeare. Among them were correspondence with Queen Elizabeth I, with the author’s wife, manuscripts of tragedies and even new, unpublished plays: “Henry II” and “Vortigern and Rowena”.

Father and son became popular among London's elite, but not for long. In 1796, Edmond Mellon revealed evidence that the documents were not originals and forced Airend Jr. to admit to forging documents that he created to attract the attention of his strict and cold father.

Autobiography of an eccentric billionaire

In 1971 little-known writer named Clifford Irving told McGraw-Hill that the famously reclusive billionaire businessman, filmmaker and aviator Howard Hughes, who went into recluse more than ten years ago, asked him to co-author his autobiography. The publisher could not refuse this opportunity and signed a contract with Irving. Irving almost managed to deceive everyone if Howard Hughes himself had not decided to break his many years of silence. In a telephone interview with a journalist, he said that he had nothing to do with his “autobiography” and did not know Clifford Irving. After exposure, Irving went to jail for 2.5 years.

Deadly fake

Consisting of 24 chapters revealing a secret plan to take over the world's governments by the Jewish elite, The Protocols Elders of Zion" occupy the place of perhaps the most dangerous and influential literary forgery in the history of mankind. It turned out that the forged document was drawn up by someone working for the secret police. Russian Empire journalist Matvey Golovin. Scholars trace the influence of several unrelated sources in the Protocols, from a pamphlet by Wilhelm Marr and the work of Jewish author Theodor Herzl to an anti-Semitic pamphlet by Hermann Goedsche and a satirical work by a French author ridiculing Napoleon III. Written as the actual minutes of a secret meeting of Zionist leaders in the Swiss city of Basel in 1897, the Protocols reveal a non-existent secret plan to seize power over Jewish-led financial, cultural and governmental organizations.

The impact of the Protocols on history

The publication of these "Protocols" led to brutal repression of the Jewish population in Tsarist Russia and continued during the formation of the Communist Party. The connection between Zion's leaders and the threat of communism led to the fact that the Protocols gained popularity overseas. Automotive magnate Henry Ford, who had previously published anti-Semitic articles more than once, ordered the publication of half a million copies of the Protocols in America. Despite the fact that evidence of the forgery of this collection of documents appeared almost immediately after publication, the popularity of the Protocols only increased. The Protocols were an integral part of Nazi propaganda, and Hitler even quoted them in his book. To this day, many still mistake this literary hoax for a genuine work.

Testament of the Emperor of Byzantium

During the Middle Ages, the conflict between the church and European rulers over power on the continent began to heat up. The Church managed to gain the upper hand thanks to an ancient, but extremely fortunate document that was at hand at the right time. The Veno of Constantinovo turned out to be a deed of gift from Emperor Constantine to Pope Sylvester, which tells of the emperor’s miraculous cure of leprosy and his conversion to the Christian faith. In connection with the acquisition of faith, the emperor bequeathed lands, wealth and control over the empire to Sylvester and the church. Constantine was ready to give up the crown, but the pope graciously renounced worldly power, however, accepting the highest ecclesiastical rank and control over most of the western empire.

Despite the fact that nothing was known about the Donation of Constantine until the 8th century, the church managed to maintain control over power in Western Europe. In the end, the clergy themselves made public the status of this document as fake, although not earlier than the 16th century.

. . .

Mystification has always been, to one degree or another, characteristic of literature. Actually, what is literary work, if not an attempt to convince someone - a reader, a critic, oneself - of the existence of a reality invented by the writer? Therefore, it is not surprising that not only worlds invented by someone have appeared, but also fake works and invented writers.

Many researchers call Homer's poems the first literary hoax - the personality of Homer, in their opinion, was invented, and the works attributed to him are the fruit of collective work that may have lasted more than one decade. It is certainly a hoax - the parody epic "Batrachomyomachy", or "The War of Mice and Frogs", attributed in turn to Homer, the ancient Greek philosopher Pigret and a number of other, less notable poets.

In the Middle Ages, the appearance of hoaxers was “facilitated” by the attitude of the people of that time towards literature: the text was sacred, and God directly transmitted it to man, who, thus, was not the author, but only a “conductor” of the Divine will. Other people's texts could be borrowed, altered and modified quite easily. It is not surprising that almost all the popular works of that time - both secular and ecclesiastical character, - were added and supplemented by scribes. During the Renaissance, when interest in ancient authors and their texts was especially high, along with previously unknown authentic works Numerous forgeries began to appear of ancient authors. They added historians - Xenophon and Plutarch. The lost poems of Catullus, the speeches of Cicero, and the satires of Juvenal were “found.” They “looked for” the writings of the church fathers and scrolls with biblical texts. Such forgeries were often arranged very inventively: manuscripts were made, which were given an “antique” appearance, and then under mysterious circumstances they were “discovered” in old monasteries, castle ruins, excavated crypts and similar places. Many of these forgeries were only exposed several centuries later.

The real explosion of literary hoaxes occurred in the second half XVIII century. The so-called imaginary translations were especially popular. In 1729, Charles Montesquieu published a "translation from the Greek" of the poem "Temple of Cnidus", in 1764 English writer Horace Walpole passed off his novel The Castle of Otranto—by the way, the first “Gothic” novel—as a translation of an Italian manuscript. For greater authenticity, Walpole also invented the author - a certain Onofrio Muralto. Daniel Defoe was a true master of passing off his texts as someone else's - out of the five hundred books he wrote, only four were published under his real name, and the rest were attributed to various historical and fictional figures. Defoe himself acted only as a publisher. So, for example, three volumes of “The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe” were written by a “sailor from York”, “The History of the Wars of Charles XII, King of Sweden” - by a certain “Scottish officer in Swedish service”, “Notes of a Cavalier” were given to him as the memoirs of a nobleman , who lived in the 17th century, during the Great Rebellion, and the "Narrative of all the Robberies, Escapes, and Other Affairs of John Sheppard" - for suicide notes the real-life famous robber John Sheppard, written by him in prison.

But the most famous literary hoax of that time was, of course, “The Songs of Ossian,” created by the talented English poet and literary critic George Macpherson in 1760-1763 on behalf of the Scottish bard Ossian, who supposedly lived in the 3rd century. Ossian's works were a huge success among the public, were translated into many languages ​​and, before their exposure, managed to leave a deep mark in world literature.

Macpherson published Ossian at a time when the Scots and Irish, united by common historical roots and equally inferior position to the English, began to actively revive their culture, language, and historical identity. In this situation, pro-Gaelic critics were ready to defend the authenticity of the poems even in the face of obvious evidence to the contrary, and even after Macpherson’s final exposure and admission of falsification, they assigned him a prominent place in the pantheon of figures of the Gaelic Renaissance. The Czech philologist Vaclav Hanka found himself in a similar situation. In 1819, he published the Kralovedvor Manuscript, which he allegedly found in the church of the city of Kralev Dvor. The manuscript was recognized as a monument from the 13th century, proving the antiquity of Czech literature, which actually did not exist at the time. early XIX century. A few years later, Ganka published another manuscript - “Zelenogorsk”, called “The Court of Libushe”, dating back to the 9th century - to those times when the rest of the Slavs did not have not only literature, but even writing. The falsity of the manuscripts was finally proven only in 1886, but even after that the name of Vaclav Hanka enjoys great respect - as a patriot who has done a lot to raise the prestige of Czech literature.

Unfortunately, not all hoaxers survived exposure so successfully. Known tragic fate the brilliant English poet Thomas Chatterton. In addition to those published under his own name satirical works, Chatterton created a number of poems that he attributed to the 15th-century monk Thomas Rowley and some of his contemporaries. Moreover, Chatterton, with early age distinguished by his love for ancient books, he approached his deception with all seriousness: he fabricated manuscripts on genuine parchment of that time, written in Old English in an ancient, difficult-to-read handwriting. Chatterton sent some of his “finds” to the already mentioned Horace Walpole - he, in Chatterton’s opinion, should have responded favorably to the fictitious work of a medieval monk. At first everything was like this, but then Walpole realized it was a fake. In 1770, Chatterton committed suicide - he was not yet eighteen years old. English literary scholars call him one of the most brilliant poets in Great Britain. Unfortunately, having played with someone else's fictional life, Thomas Chatterton lost his...

Among the most famous hoaxers, Prosper Merimee should also be mentioned. First, he published a collection of plays under the name of the fictitious Spanish actress Clara Gazul, then a collection of peculiar prose ballads “Guzla”, attributed to the equally unreal Serbian storyteller Iakinfu Maglanovic. Although Merimee was not particularly hiding - in the collection of plays there was even a portrait of Gazul published, which was a portrait of Merimee himself in a woman’s dress: anyone who knew the writer by sight would easily recognize him. However, Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin himself succumbed to the hoax, translating 11 songs from “Guzla” for his collection “Songs” Western Slavs».

Pushkin, by the way, was no stranger to hoaxes: when publishing the famous “Belkin’s Tales,” the poet himself acted only as a publisher. And in 1837, Pushkin published the article “The Last of the Relatives of Joan of Arc,” where he quoted Voltaire’s letters, written by the poet himself. He also resorted to “imaginary translations” - for censorship reasons, many of his “free-thinking” poems were accompanied by postscripts: “from Latin”, “from Andrei Chenier”, “from French”... Lermontov, Nekrasov, and other authors did the same. There were many outright fakes: fake novels by Walter Scott, Anna Radcliffe and Balzac, plays by Moliere and even Shakespeare. Let us modestly put aside the question of whether Shakespeare himself was not the greatest literary hoax.

In Russia over the last two hundred yearsliterary hoaxes and there were a lot of hoaxes. For example, Kozma Prutkov is a smug graphomaniac, whose literary activity occurred in the 50-60s of the 19th century. Only after some time it became clear that Prutkov was created by the Zhemchuzhnikov brothers and A.K. Tolstoy. The image of Prutkov was so overgrown with flesh and blood that it was published full meeting his works, his portrait was painted, and his relatives began to appear in literature - for example, in 1913, the non-existent publishing house "Green Island" published a collection of the first poems of his "niece" Angelika Safyanova - a literary hoax of the writer L.V. Nikulina.

Another similar case- the beautiful and sad story of Cherubina de Gabriac. The image created by Maximilian Voloshin and Elizaveta Dmitrieva (in Vasilyeva’s marriage) struck the imagination of contemporaries with its tragic beauty, and the exposure of the deception led to a duel between Voloshin and Gumilev and Vasilyeva’s almost complete departure from literature. Only many years later she released another poetry collection, “The House Under the Pear Tree” - again under someone else’s name, this time the Chinese poet Li Xiangzi.

The most famous hoax of the twentieth century was the image of the novelist Emile Azhar, brought to life by the famous French writer Romain Gary, laureate of the Prix Goncourt. Tired of his established literary reputation, Gary published Azhar's first novel, Fat Man, in 1974, which immediately won love and recognition. Azhar's very next novel was awarded the Prix Goncourt - thus Romain Gary (or rather, Roman Katsev - the writer's real name) became the only two-time winner in the world of this award, which is never awarded twice. Azhar, however, refused the prize - and as it turned out, Paul Pavlovich, Gary’s nephew, who later ended up in a psychiatric clinic, was hiding under this name. And it soon became known that Pavlovich only played, at his uncle’s request, the role of Azhar, which he wrote about in his book “The Man Who Was Believed.” In 1980, Romain Gary - and at the same time Emile Azhar - committed suicide.

What made all these - and many other - people, undoubtedly talented, often even brilliant, hide their faces behind someone else's mask, giving up the rights to their own works? Apart from the obvious cases where the reason was the thirst for profit or other, much more noble, but also completely understandable reasons (as, for example, in the story of Vaclav Hanka), the motives for such behavior, which often leads to the most tragic consequences, are unclear. For example, many of Chatterton’s acquaintances were perplexed: if he had published his works under his own name, he would have won universal recognition. But Chatterton felt much more confident in the role of “Rowley” than when he was himself. Macpherson did the same - while remaining himself, he wrote much weaker than when he transformed into Ossian. Such a “mask,” which often completely replaces the face, is a necessary element of the hoax. Play, an unconditional condition for any creativity, takes on exaggerated proportions among hoaxers. The creator of a hoax can often create only by dissolving his true self in a mask he has invented, creating not only his own world, but also the demiurge of the only inhabitant of this world. An invented mask helps the writer move away from the restrictions imposed on him (or by himself) - class, stylistic, historical... He gets the opportunity, by rejecting his own “I,” to gain creative freedom in return - and thus build himself anew. Since the era of modernism, the idea of ​​the game, the split personality, the “hidden” author has dominated literature itself. Authors build themselves, their biography, according to the laws of the texts they write - the text, thus, is much more real than its author. The boundaries between literature and life are shifting: the figure of the author becomes an element artistic structure text, and the result is a kind of complex work, consisting of the actual text (or texts) and the constructed author.

From this point of view, virtual reality, which has settled on the Internet, provides simply unlimited opportunities for various kinds of hoaxes, placing existing people and fictional characters on initially equal terms. Both have only an email address and the ability to generate text. All the dangers that awaited their predecessors have now disappeared: there is no need to present manuscripts or appear in person at various events, keep an eye on linguistic features or track allusions and borrowings in your own and others’ works. Anyone who enters the vastness of the World Wide Web with his literary—or creative work claiming to be—becomes real at the moment of its appearance, and it should be taken into account that if he leaves the virtual space, his existence will have to be proven again. Because what was generated by the Internet must live in it.

After all, the famous phrase “The whole world is a stage, and the people in it are actors” applies to any world, regardless of its reality.

This is a literary hoax text or fragment of text, the author of which attributes its creation to a figurehead, real or fictitious. Literary mystification is the opposite of plagiarism: the plagiarist borrows someone else’s word without citing the author; the hoaxer, on the contrary, attributes his word to someone else. The main difference between a literary hoax and an ordinary text is the creation of an image of the author, within the imaginary boundaries of whose mental, social and linguistic world the work appears. the dummy author is embodied in the style of the text, therefore literary hoax always involves stylization, imitation literary language a specific author or imitation of the style of an era, within the boundaries of which the social and cultural idiolect of a fictional author is created. A literary hoax, therefore, is convenient form both for experimentation in the field of style and for inheriting a stylistic tradition. From the point of view of the type of false authorship, literary hoaxes are divided into three groups:

1. Imitating ancient monuments, the name of the author of which has not been preserved or has not been named (“Kraledvor Manuscript”);
2. Attributed to historical or legendary persons (“Wortingern and Rowena”, 1796, issued by W. G. Ireland for a newly discovered play by W. Shakespeare; continuation of Pushkin’s “Rusalka”, performed by D. P. Zuev; “The Poems of Ossian”, 1765, J. Macpherson );
3. Forwarded to fictional authors: “deceased” (“Tales of Belkin”, 1830, A.S. Pushkin, “The Life of Vasily Travnikov”, 1936, V.F. Khodasevich) or “living” (Cherubina de Gabriak, E. Azhar); for the sake of credibility, the fictional author is provided with a biography, and the real author can act as his publisher and/or executor.

Some works, which subsequently gained worldwide fame, were performed in the form of literary hoaxes (“Gulliver’s Travels”, 1726, J. Swift, “Robinson Crusoe”, 1719, D. Defoe, “Don Quixote”, 1605-15, M. Cervantes; "History of New York, 1809, W. Irving).

An important property of a literary hoax is the temporary appropriation of someone else's name by its author.. The hoaxer literally creates the text on behalf of another; the name is the prototype of language and the only reality of the imaginary author. Hence the increased attention to the name and its internal form. The name in a literary hoax is connected, on the one hand, with the language and architectonics of the text (for example, the testimony of E.I. Dmitrieva about the rootedness of the name Cherubina de Gabriak in the poetic fabric of works written in her name), and on the other hand, with the name of the real author (anagram , cryptogram, double translation effect, etc.). The misconception of the reader and the detection of forgery, two stages of the reception of literary mystification, follow not from the reader’s gullibility, but from the very nature of the name, which does not allow, within the boundaries of literary reality, to distinguish between its real and imaginary bearers. The goal is an aesthetic and/or life-creative experiment. This is what distinguishes it from forgeries, the authors of which are guided solely by mercantile considerations (for example, Gutenberg’s companion I. Fust sold the first Mainz Bibles at exorbitant prices in Paris, passing them off as handwritten books), and intentional distortions historical event or biography of a historical figure. Fakes historical monuments(“The Tale of Two Embassies”, “Correspondence of Ivan the Terrible with the Turkish Sultan” - both 17th century) and biographical false testimony (“Letters and notes of Ommer de Gelle”, 1933, composed by P.P. Vyazemsky) are quasi-mystifications.

The history of the study of literary hoaxes began with their collection. The first experiments in cataloging literary hoaxes date back to the period of the late Middle Ages - the beginning of the Renaissance and are associated with the need to attribute ancient texts. Attribution experiments of ancient and medieval monuments laid the scientific foundations of textual criticism and textual criticism both in Europe (criticism of the “Donation of Constantine”) and in Russia, where partial examinations of manuscripts were carried out since the 17th century. By the beginning of the 19th century, extensive material had been accumulated for compiling reference books and classifying types of fictitious authorship: literary hoaxes, pseudonyms, plagiarism, forgeries. At the same time, it became clear that compiling an exhaustive catalog of literary hoaxes is impossible, the science of literature is powerless to verify its entire archive, and philological methods for determining the authenticity of a text, especially in the absence of an autograph, are extremely unreliable and can produce contradictory results. In the 20th century, the study of literary hoax ceased to be exclusively a problem of textual criticism and copyright law; it began to be considered in the context of the history and theory of literature. In Russia about literary mystification as a subject theoretical research first said by E.L. Lann in 1930. Interest in literary mystification was stimulated by attention to the problem of dialogue, “one’s own” and “alien” words, which became one of the central philosophical and philological topics in the 1920s; It is no coincidence that in Lann’s book the influence of M. M. Bakhtin’s ideas is noticeable. Central problem Literary hoax in its theoretical light becomes someone else's name and a word spoken on someone else's behalf. Literary mystification is subject not only to changing literary eras and styles, but also to changing ideas about authorship and copyright, about the boundaries of literature and life, reality and fiction. From antiquity to the Renaissance, and in Russia until the beginning of the 19th century, the history of fictitious authorship is dominated by forgeries of ancient manuscript monuments and literary hoaxes attributed to historical or legendary figures.

In Greece from the 3rd century BC. The genre of fictitious letters created on behalf of famous authors of the past is known: the “seven” Greek sages, philosophers and political figures (Thales, Solon, Pythagoras, Plato, Hippocrates, etc.). The purpose of the forgery was often pragmatic: apologetic (giving current political and philosophical ideas greater authority) or discrediting (for example, Diotima composed 50 letters of obscene content on behalf of Epicurus); less often didactic (exercises in rhetoric schools to acquire skills good style). Literary mystification had the same meaning in literature medieval Europe and in ancient Russian literature. During the Renaissance, its character changes significantly. Literary hoaxes appear and begin to predominate, attributed to fictitious authors, for which the hoaxer composes not only the text, but also the author, his name, biography, and sometimes a portrait. In modern times, the history of literary mystification consists of uneven bursts, the main of which occur in the eras of Baroque, Romanticism, and Modernism, which is associated with the sense of the world as linguistic creativity inherent in these eras. Literary hoaxes in modern times can be deliberately humorous and parodic in nature: the reader, according to the author’s plan, should not believe in their authenticity (Kozma Prutkov).

August 3 in the New building of the Russian national library(Moskovsky Ave., 165) the exhibition “Under a False Name: Pseudonyms and Literary Hoaxes” began its work.

The exhibition presents the creativity of famous domestic and foreign writers who worked under pseudonyms or deliberately attributed authorship to a real person or passed off their works as folk art.

During the Renaissance, interest in ancient authors and their texts was so high that, along with previously unknown genuine works of ancient authors, numerous fakes, so-called imaginary translations, began to appear. Many researchers call Homer's poems the first literary hoax. The personality of Homer, in their opinion, was invented, and the works attributed to him were the fruit of collective labor. Today it is difficult to find out which of the ancient works are real and which are Renaissance hoaxes.

The most famous master The English writer and publicist Daniel Defoe passed off his texts as someone else's. Of the 500 books he wrote, only 4 were published under his real name, and the rest were attributed to historical and fictitious personalities. Defoe himself acted only as a publisher. So, for example, three volumes of “The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe” were written by a “sailor from York”, “The History of the Wars of Charles XII, King of Sweden” - by a “Scottish officer in Swedish service”, “Notes of a Cavalier” were given to him as the memoirs of a nobleman, who lived in the 17th century, during the Great Rebellion, and “The Narrative of All the Robberies, Escapes and Other Affairs of John Sheppard” - for the suicide notes written in prison by the real-life famous robber John Sheppard. The exhibition features Daniel Defoe's richly illustrated two-volume book Robinson Crusoe and His interesting adventures described by himself" (with 200 drawings engraved on stone, 1870).

The literary hoax “The Song of Ossian”, created by the most talented English poet and literary critic George Macpherson, who wrote in 1760-1763 on behalf of the Scottish bard Ossian, who allegedly lived in the 3rd century, also entered history.

Among the popular hoaxers, it is worth mentioning Prosper Merimee, who secretly published a collection of plays “Gusli” (“Guzla”) with notes and a portrait of the “author”, a collector of folklore, a fictional guslar named Iakinf Maglanovich. The hoax was successful: for real Slavic folklore“Gusli” was also accepted by Adam Mickiewicz and Alexander Pushkin, who translated 11 ballads into Russian for his collection “Songs of the Western Slavs.” Pushkin, by the way, was no stranger to hoaxes, publishing the famous “Belkin's Tales”, the poet himself acted only as a publisher.

In Russia over the past two hundred years, literary hoaxes and hoaxers have been encountered in abundance. The fictional Kozma Prutkov, created by Alexei Tolstoy and the Zhemchuzhnikov brothers, was endowed with his own biography, personal qualities and literary reference points and was a parody of the literary official.

The book “Leaving the World Unsolved...” (2009) will introduce exhibition guests to the biography of the Russian poetess Elizaveta Vasilyeva (Dmitrieva) and the image of the mysterious beauty Cherubina de Gabriac, created by her and Maximilian Voloshin and which became the loudest hoax of the Silver Age.

Visitors will also learn about other literary hoaxers, including the American Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens), the Frenchman Emil Azhar (Roman Leibovich Katsev), compatriots Andrei Bely (Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev), Sasha Cherny (Alexander Mikhailovich Glikberg) and Boris Akunin (Grigory Shalvovich Chkhartishvili) ... What forced these and many other writers, undoubtedly talented and brilliant, to hide their faces behind someone else's mask, giving up the rights to their own works? Visitors to the exhibition will learn about the causes and consequences of such phenomena in world literature from such publications as “The History of Literary Hoaxes: “From Homer to the Internet” by Vitaly Vulf and Serafima Chebotar (2003), as well as from the book “Disguised Literature” by Valentin Dmitriev (1973 d.). Among the publications that also deserve special attention, it should be noted, the book “The illustrated Mark Twain” (2000). The literary mask, which often completely replaces the writer’s personality, is a necessary element of mystification, the authors explain. According to researchers, play, as an unconditional condition for any creativity, takes on exaggerated proportions among hoaxers. The creator of a hoax can often create only in a mask he has invented, creating his own world and the only inhabitant in it. The mask helps to move away from imposed restrictions - class, stylistic, historical... and the author, as it were, is born again.

Today, virtual reality, which has settled on the Internet, provides unlimited opportunities for various kinds of hoaxes, putting existing people and fictional characters on equal terms. Both of them have only an email address and the ability to generate text...

Materials for the exhibition were provided by the Russian Book and Russian Magazine Funds, the Foreign Book and Foreign Magazine Funds, as well as the Central Reference Library, the Printmaking Department and the Microform Fund.

Admission with a library card.