This article analyzes a 1916 story by Isaak Babel', "El'ia Isaakovich and Margarita Prokof'evna" (published in Maksim Gor'kii's Letopis'), in which a Jewish businessman from Odessa takes refuge with an Orel prostitute to avoid being sent back to the Pale of Settlement by the police. Safran sees El'ia Isaakovich as a character type new to mainstream Russian literature, a strong Jewish man who is neither a victim nor an exploiter of Russians but can inspire them to positive change. Safran pursues four related lines of reasoning: she sets the story in light of Gor'kii's attitude toward Babel' and the "Jewish Question"; she reads it as a parody of the urban myth of the Jewish false prostitute; she compares it to Jewish folktales about Elijah the Prophet; and she considers the hero's repetition of the word nivroko, a formula that Odessa Jews used to ward off the evil eye.
The article focuses on the arrival of Igor Dedkov in Kostroma in September 1957. Being placed on a job at the editorial office of the regional newspaper Severnaya Pravda in a quiet provincial city, he worked in Kostroma for more than thirty years and returned to Moscow as a well-known and respected literary critic and journalist. The publication focuses on the fact that the first years of Igor Dedkov's life and work were very difficult due to gradual adaptation to life in the Kostroma outland, which he later remembered very warmly and after a number of years even with frank admiration. But at that time (from September 1957 onwards) the situation for the young journalist was not easy at all. Unfortunately, in his diary published after his death, I. Dedkov referred to this stage of his biography only casually and without detail. Possibly, it can be accounted for by subsequent correction and radical change in I. Dedkov's attitude to the province. The main purpose of this publication is to fill in this gap by introducing into scientific circulation a number of unpublished letters and other autobiographical materials which are currently stored in the I. Dedkov Interregional Scientific and Educational Center at Kostroma State University. The use of these and a number of other historiographical sources allowed us to clarify many important details in the life and work of the novice journalist of a regional newspaper, who left the capital for one of the provincial cities on his own initiative. The main methods used by the author of this article are the elements of system analysis, the method of historical reconstruction, induction and deduction. The use of these methods and the use of a previously unknown body of sources allowed the author of the article to significantly expand and deepen the existing (rather limited) ideas about the early period of I. Dedkov's life and work, about the beginning of his formation as an original journalist and literary critic, who later entered the "great" literature.
