Literary life as a literary fact. A.V. Markov-Vinogradsky’s diary

Literary fact does not exist outside literary life, and literary life can exist only around the literary fact. Moreover, in the era of mass culture, the literary fact is in the focus of specialist's interests, and a layman prefers literary life to the literary fact and reads biography books on Pushkin instead of Pushkin’s poetry. This situation has already developed in the XIX century, even in an environment that, it would seem, should have kept the lofty spirit of the "Pushkin circle" writers and resisted everything connected with the "trade direction" in literature. As a result, literary life becomes the center of literary attention – literary fact.