История парикмахерской куклы и другие сочинения ботаника Х

by Alexander V. Chayanov

В настоящем однотомнике впервые объединены художественные произведения Александра Васильевича Чаянова, одного из наиболее ярких и разносторонних деятелей русской культуры первой четверти XX в.
Профессиональный ученый - биолог, экономист и историк, - Чаянов публиковал свои художественные сочинения под ироническим псевдонимом "Ботаник X." Вышедшие крошечными тиражами в 1920-х гг., они быстро стали библиографическими редкостями. После того, как в 1929 г. Чаянов был арестован по ложному обвинению, его книги были изъяты из обращения и в значительной своей части уничтожены.
В предлагаемый том вошли пьеса "Обманщики" и пять романтических повестей: "История парикмахерской куклы, или Последняя любовь Московского архитектора М."; "Венедиктов, или Достопамятные события жизни моей"; "Венецианское зеркало, или Диковинные похождения стеклянного человека"; "Необычайные, но истинные приключения графа Федора Михайловича Бутурлина"; "Юлия, или Встречи под Новодевичем".

469 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

Alexander V. Chayanov (Russian: Александр Васильевич Чаянов) (1888-October 3, 1937) was a Soviet agrarian economist and scholar of rural sociology.

He was a proponent of agricultural cooperation, but was skeptical with respect to the indiscriminate introduction of large-scale farms. Chayanov's skepticism was rooted in the idea that households, especially peasant households which practice subsistence farming, will tend to produce only the amount of food that they need to survive. He believed that the Soviet government would find it difficult to force these households to cooperate and produce a surplus. These views were sharply criticized by Stalin as "defence of the kulaks". However, Chayanov was ultimately shown to be right about the problems with Soviet agricultural planning.

In 1930 Chayanov was arrested in the "Case of the Labour Peasant Party" (Трудовая крестьянская партия), fabricated by the NKVD. The name of the party was taken from a science fiction book written by Chayanov in the 1920s. The process was intended to be a show trial, but it fell apart, due to the strong will of the defendants. Nevertheless on a secret trial in 1932 Chayanov was sentenced to 5 years in Kazakhstan labor camps. On October 3, 1937 Chayanov was arrested again, tried and shot the same day.

His wife was repressed as well and spent 18 years in labor camps. Chayanov was rehabilitated in 1987.

Chayanov's major works, Peasant Farm Organization (originally published in Russian in 1925) and On the Theory of Non-Capitalist Economic Systems were first translated into English in 1966. Chayanov's theory of the peasant household influenced economic anthropology. The substantivist Marshall Sahlins drew on Chayanov in his theory of the domestic mode of production, but later authors have argued that Chayanov's use of neo-classical economics supports a formalist position.

His book Puteshestvie moego brata Alekseia v stranu krest’ianskoi utopii [My brother Alexei's journey into the land of peasant utopia] (Moskva: Gosizdat, 1920) predicted a rapid transfer of power into peasant hands; its hero wakes up in 1984, "in a country where the village has conquered the city, where handicraft cooperatives have replaced industry." Like Evgeny Zamyatin's We, it contains theosophical elements.