Evno Azef in the novel Solomennaya Storozhka by Yuri Davydov: the motif of political double-dealing
In the historical and documentary novels by Yuri V. Davydov (1924-2002), the motive of political double-dealing plays a very important role closely connected with the categories of provocation, betrayal, and treachery. Considering contradictions of the historical process over the last four decades of the Empire of the Romanovs, the writer sharply confronts in his literary plots the historical figures of high-minded and tragic figures of the Russian revolutionary movement (Herman Lopatin, Vladimir Burtsev) against the figures of agent provocateurs and doubledealers (Sergei Degaev, Sergei Nechaev, Evno Azef) who reflected the essence of the phenomena of political double-dealing, and moral and ethical faithlessness unmasked by the author. Being defined as degaevshina, nechaevshina, and azefovshina, these phenomena are an integral part of the artistic reality in such novels by Yu. Davydov as The Silent Time of the Fall (1969-1970), Two Bundles of Letters (1986) (in the first edition entitled Two Bundles of Letters. The Story of Herman Lopatin (1982)) and The Bestseller (1998). In the novel Two Bundles of Letters a special plot clearly characteristic of sensation and detective stories is devoted to smoking out Evno F. Azef who acted as both an agent of the political secret police and a member of a revolutionary terrorist group for 15 years. The former member of Narodnaya Vola Vladimir L. Burtsev was the first to smoke out Super-Judas and gathered the evidence against the suspect Azef/Raskin from Herman Lopatin, Luba Menkina, Boris Savinkov, and Aleksei Lopukhin. Thanks to Lopukhin, the former director of the political secret police department, he got to know the real surname of Azef acting as a super agent and a regular co-operator. Focusing on the stages of life and activities of the king of the troublemakers, Yuri Davydov tried to expose in the protagonist such characteristic features as selfishness, self-esteem, self-love, impunity, cynicism, moral nihilism, passion etc. which contributed to making Azef an agent provocateur and a traitor. The analysis presented in this paper shows that Evno Azef, the leader of a secret terrorist organization of socialist revolutionaries, remains a symbol of political decline, moral degradation, and human improbity, and carries the responsibility for numerous murders, assassinations and acts of ferreting out problem activists resulting from his double-dealing and criminal provocative activities in the Russian revolutionary movement on the turn of the 19th century.