“I’m Waiting for Changes in my Fate”: on V. V. Vinogradov’s Vyatka Letters to his Wife (to the 130th Anniversary Since the Scientist’s Birth)

The article analyzesarchival materials about the life and work of V. V. Vinogradovduring the Vyatka exile of 1934–1936. Attention is drawn to therelief and richness of the philological issues of the letters, contrastingwith the description of everyday life. An important place in the epistolary is occupied by the precedent name of Pushkin. Many events andindividuals related tothe scientist’s work are evaluated. It is emphasized that V. V. Vinogradov's wife, N. M. Malysheva, who supported the scientist during his exile, occupied a special place in his correspondence. The author shows how V. V. Vinogradov overcame domestic troubles, giving himself up to philological plans andimmersing himself in readingRussian and worldclassics (“I readall Turgenev’s plays”). It is noted that the image of V. V. Vinogradov as reader isone of the most picturesque from the point of view of characterization of his linguistic personality. The author emphasizes the encyclopedic knowledge of V. V. Vinogradov, hispassion for scientific research in the following spheres:Pushkin studies, Gogol’s language, “literary phraseology”, a textbook on modernRussian literary language,Lev Tolstoy,Saltykov-Shchedrin, research onlinguistics, newspaper journalism, etc. Letters show the features of the linguistic personality of the unbroken scientist:exceptional diligence (“...Iwork veryhard. Evento the point of exhaustion”), attention todetails, sharp, criticalmind, cognitivethinking, aphorism, self-irony. Hislinguistic and philosophical meditations, observations on the events that took place in the scientificcommunity and onhimself are a mirror of the worldview andvalue attitudes of a talented person who is an exponent of high truth in contrast to the momentary context of reality. The letters providerich materialfor compiling a psycholinguistic portrait of V. V. Vinogradov. They allow us to reconstructpreviously unknown factsfrom his biography and include themin the context of the annals of Russianscience.