Note literary hoaxes. Literary hoaxes and pseudonyms

Municipal Educational Budgetary Institution

"Secondary School No. 54"

Orenburg

Research topic:

« Art literary hoaxes »

Ibragimova Olga

Place of study: student of class 8A

MOBU "Secondary School No. 54"

Orenburg

Supervisor:

Kalinina Irina Borisovna

Russian language teacher

and literature

2015-2016 academic year year

1. Introduction.

1.1. Hoax - what is it?................................................. 3

1.2. Goal and objectives. ……………………………………. 4

1.3. Hypothesis…………………………………………...4

1.4. Object of study. ……………………………....4

1.5. Subject of research. ……………………………..4

1.6. Research methods. ……………………………...4

2. Main part.

2.1.1. Why literary hoaxhas not yet been describedas an independent form of art?......5

2.1.2.Literary hoax is a synthetic art form. .......6

General principles of the art of literary mystification.

2.2.1. Reasons for hoaxes. ………………………7

2.2.2. Special techniques of literary hoax...8

2.2.3. Unmasking hoaxes…………………....9

Literary Hoaxes Revealed……….9

3. Conclusion.

4. List of used literature.

Introduction.

Hoax - what is it?

Once in a literature lesson, when we were studying the life and creative path of A.S. Pushkina, literature teacher Irina Borisovna, mentioning the poet’s uncle, Vasily Lvovich Pushkin, who was himself a famous poet in his time, said that he was the owner of the manuscript of the monument of ancient Russian literature “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign,” which burned down during the fire of Moscow in 1812 and that there is a version that the author of “The Lay of Igor’s Campaign” was Vasily Lvovich himself. During this period, there were many literary forgeries or literary hoaxes in Russian and European literature. And since hoaxes are interesting to me, I decided to continue working on this topic.

It is necessary to clarify what literary hoax is. This is usually the name given to literary works whose authorship is deliberately attributed to a person, real or fictitious, or is presented as folk art. At the same time, literary hoaxes strive to preserve the stylistic style of the author, to recreate - or create from scratch - his creative image. Hoaxes can be carried out for completely different purposes: for the sake of profit, to shame critics or in the interests of literary struggle, from the author’s lack of confidence in his abilities or for certain ethical reasons. The main difference between a hoax and, for example, a pseudonym is the fundamental self-delimitation of the real author from his own work.

Mystification has always been, to one degree or another, characteristic of literature. Strictly speaking, what is a literary work if not an attempt to convince someone - a reader, a critic, oneself - of the existence of a reality invented by the writer? Therefore, it is not surprising that not only worlds invented by someone have appeared, but also fake works and invented writers. Everyone who was guided by the desire to attribute to the author a work that was not written by him stopped at creating the work and putting on it not their own names, but the name of the mentioned author. Others did not attempt to publish poems under their own name, but always signed the names of fictitious characters. Still others called their poems “translations” from foreign authors. Some authors went further, becoming “foreigners” writing in Russian. I wanted to learn more about the art of literary hoaxes. I turned to the Internet and found little-known and even unique publications, on the basis of which I wrote my scientific work.

Purpose my work is: to identify the general patterns of the art of literary hoax

Tasks:

Find out as much information as possible about literary hoaxes.

Reveal the features of the art of literary hoaxes.

Describe the features of the art of literary hoaxes.

Prove that literary hoax is a synthetic art form.

Identify as many reasons as possible for the emergence of literary hoaxes.

Determine how a hoax is exposed.

Find as many literary hoaxes as possible.

Systematize the collected material.

Research hypothesis: The art of literary hoaxes is a synthetic art that has existed for a very long time and has its own laws and canons.

Object of study: Literary hoaxes.

Subject of research: Literary hoaxes as art.

Research methods:

Complex analysis - consideration of an object from different points of view.

The imperial method is the collection of data and information about the subject of research.

Data processing method.

The induction method is a method in which a general conclusion is built on the basis of partial premises

The generalization method is a method in which the general properties of an object are established.

Main part.

Literary hoax as art.

Why is literary hoax still not described as an independent art form?

“Literary hoaxes have existed as long as literature itself.” Almost every article about literary hoaxes begins with this phrase, and it is impossible to disagree with it. As soon as books began to be published, writers appeared who wanted to play pranks on their contemporaries, and more often, on their descendants. There seems to be some kind of attractive force in “fooling” as many people as possible at the same time. "Reader, … laugh: the height of earthly pleasures, laughing at everyone from around the corner"- Pushkin wrote frankly. Of course, the reasons that pushed writers to commit hoaxes were, as a rule, more serious and deeper, but the love of humor cannot be discounted.

And here the question involuntarily comes to mind: why is literary mystification, having existed for thousands of years, still not described as an independent form of art (after all, for example, the art of war has been described - and quite thoroughly - which, like the art of mystification, is largely relies on intuition)? Most articles only tell the stories of one or another long-solved literary hoax; at best, they propose a classification based on who the literary work is attributed to: a writer, a historical figure, or a fictional author. Meanwhile, literary hoaxes have their own general limitations and special possibilities, their own rules and their own techniques - their own laws of the genre. Suffice it to say that in a literary hoax the work of art itself becomes an enlarged sign with which the hoaxer operates in life - in the game, and the general opinion about this work of art is the same subject of the game as the work itself. In other words, in the “table of ranks” of this game, literary hoax is higher than the work of art itself. And this game has its own masters and losers, its own masters and even geniuses. Of course, literature is not the only art form that has misled many people; There have been hoaxers in painting and music, in archeology and cinema, and even in science. But my interests are primarily related to literature.

Literary hoax is a synthetic art form.

Is literary hoax a synthetic art form? First you need to find out what a synthetic art form is. Synthetic arts are those types of artistic creativity that represent an organic fusion or a relatively free combination of different types of arts, forming a qualitatively new and unified aesthetic whole. In fact, if in order to write a significant literary work, talent and a pen (quill pen, pencil, typewriter, computer keyboard) are enough, then the hoaxer must also have the ability to mislead a large number of people outside the very process of creating a literary work . If a writer masters the art of playing in the Word, then the hoaxer must also possess the art of playing in Life, since literary hoax is a collective game played both in life and in literature. Moreover, not only those who take the hoax proposed by him at face value, but also those who are “on the side” of the hoaxer, initiated into the hoax, unwittingly take part in the game. There may be few of them, one or two people, or, as in Shakespeare’s hoax, dozens, but, with rare exceptions, they always take place.

Lann E. L. "Literary mystification."

Dmitriev V.G. Those who hid their name: From the history of pseudonyms and anonyms / Dmitriev, Valentin Grigorievich, Dmitriev, V.G. - M.: Nauka, 1970. - 255s

"Alexander Pushkin. The Little Humpbacked Horse”, 3rd edition; M., ID KAZAROV, 2011

Yu. Danilin Clara Gazul \ Joseph L "Estrange \ Giakinf Maglanovich \ © 2004 FEB.

Gililov I.M. The Game of William Shakespeare, or the Mystery of the Great Phoenix (2nd edition). M.: Intl. Relationships, 2000.

Encyclopedia of pseudonyms of Russian poets.

Kozlov V.P. Secrets of falsification: A manual for university teachers and students. 2nd ed. M.: Aspect Press, 1996.

REVIEW

For the research work of Ekaterina Yurievna Parilova, a 10th grade student at the Rudnogorsk Secondary School.

Topic: “The art of literary hoaxes.”

Ekaterina Parilova's work is dedicated to the art of literary hoaxes.

There is no comprehensive survey of literary forgeries in any language. The reason is not difficult to establish: the science of literature is powerless to verify its entire archive. It is powerless because this verification presupposes the presence of primary sources, that is, manuscripts that do not raise doubts about authenticity. But what an immeasurable number of such manuscripts have been lost forever! And, as a result, the history of world literature, knowing about the falsification of many monuments, tries to forget about it.

Purpose of the study: to identify general patterns of the art of literary mystification.

Research objectives: find out as much data as possible about literary hoaxes; reveal the features of the art of literary hoaxes; describe the features of the art of literary hoaxes; prove that literary hoax is a synthetic art form; identify as many reasons as possible for the appearance of literary hoaxes; establish how a hoax is exposed; find as many literary hoaxes as possible; systematize the collected material.

When writing a research paper, the student used the following methods: 1) Complex analysis; 2) Imperial method; 3) Data processing method; 4) Method of induction; 5) Generalization method.

The work provides a rationale for the relevance of the topic under study, put forward goals, set tasks, and formulate a hypothesis; the methods, object and subject of the research are determined; a review of the literature on the topic is given. The material in the work is presented in compliance with internal logic; there is a logical relationship between sections. The author's erudition in the area under consideration is traced. In my opinion, the work has no shortcomings. I have not found any errors or inaccuracies in it. I recommend that teachers of Russian language and literature use the material from this research work.

Reviewer: Tatyana Aleksandrovna Ziatdinova, teacher of Russian language and literature, Municipal Educational Institution “Rudnogorskaya Secondary School”

textual criticism of a text is a branch of philological sciences that studies works of writing and literature in order to restore history, critically verify and establish their texts, which are then used for further research, interpretation, publication and other purposes.

Famous writers who never existed

Text: Mikhail Vizel/GodLiteratury.RF
Photo: Rene Magritte “Son of Man”

By tradition April 1 It is customary to give comic news about events that did not happen and invented sensations. We decided to remind you of the five most famous Russian writers who never actually existed.

1. Ivan Petrovich Belkin

The first and most significant Russian “virtual author”, who emerged in the fall of 1830 under the pen of Pushkin. It's not just a nickname; By writing “Belkin’s Tale,” Pushkin tried to get away from himself, a famous lyric poet and the darling of secular salons, who was also under the personal censorship of the tsar himself. And write strictly realistic stories on behalf of a modest provincial debutant, a retired army lieutenant - for whom he came up with a biography and even completed it by declaring poor Ivan Petrovich dead. However, he himself did not keep the secret very strictly. On the contrary, he instructed Pletnev, who was engaged in publishing stories, how to deal with booksellers: “Whisper my name to Smirdin, so that he whispers to the buyers.”

2. Kozma Prutkov

If Ivan Petrovich Belkin is the most “significant” of Russian virtual authors, then the “director of the Assay Office” is the most famous author. And, perhaps, the most prolific. Which is not surprising, given that not one, but four people wrote “on his behalf” in the 50s and 60s of the 19th century - Count Alexei Konstantinovich Tolstoy and his cousins, the three Zhemchuzhnikov brothers. “Wise thoughts” of Kozma Prutkov have become sayings: “You cannot embrace the immensity,” “If you read the inscription on an elephant’s cage: buffalo, don’t believe your eyes,” and we often forget that they were written as a mockery, in modern terms - banter . It is no coincidence that Kozma Prutkov, like another similar “piit” - Captain Lebyadkin from Dostoevsky’s “Demons”, is considered a predecessor of the poetry of the absurd and conceptualism.

3. Cherubina De Gabriac

The most romantic of virtual authors. It arose in the summer of 1909 as a result of close communication (in Koktebel, freeing from conventions) of the 22-year-old anthroposophical philologist Elizaveta Dmitrieva and the already famous poet and literary figure Maximilian Voloshin. It was he who suggested that the enthusiastic young lady, who studied medieval poetry at the Sorbonne, write poetry not in her own name (which, admittedly, is quite ordinary, like Lisa’s appearance), but in the name of a certain Russian Catholic woman with French roots. And then he actively “promoted” the poems of the mysterious Cherubina in the editorial offices of aesthetic metropolitan magazines, with the employees of which the poetess herself communicated exclusively by phone - thereby driving them crazy. The hoax ended quickly - when Nikolai Gumilev, who met Lisa in Paris a year earlier than Voloshin, considered that he had “stole” her from him and challenged his “rival” to a duel. The famous “second duel on the Chernaya River,” fortunately, ended with minimal damage - Voloshin lost his galosh in the snow, after which Sasha Cherny called him “Vax Kaloshin” in one of his poems. For Dmitrieva herself, Cherubina’s short history ended with a long creative and personal crisis - in 1911 she married a man who had nothing to do with poetry and went with him to Central Asia.

4.

Soviet times were not very conducive to full-fledged literary hoaxes. Literature was a matter of national importance, and no pranks were inappropriate here. (It is necessary, however, to put into brackets the difficult question of full-voiced Russian versions of the epics of the peoples of the USSR, created by disgraced metropolitan intellectuals.) But since the beginning of the 90s, “virtual authors” have densely filled the pages of books. For the most part, they are purely commercial and disposable. But one of them “hatched” and became a well-known brand. It’s strange to remember now, but back in 2000, I carefully kept the secret of my authorship, because I was embarrassed by this activity, writing entertaining retro detective stories, in front of my intellectual friends.

5. Nathan Dubovitsky

The author of the action-packed novel “Near Zero”, which caused a lot of noise in 2009, whose true identity has still not been officially revealed - although indirect “evidence” quite eloquently points to a high-ranking representative of the Russian political establishment. But he is in no hurry to confirm his authorship, and neither will we. It's more fun with virtual authors. And not only April 1.

The problem of literary mystification is one of the most pressing in modern literature. According to the classification proposed by E. Lann, all literary hoaxes are divided into two types: forgeries of works of impersonal creativity; forgeries of copyrighted works attributed to: a) writers, b) historical figures, c) fictional authors (Lani E. Literary mystification. M.. 1930, p. 67).

A special place among hoaxes is occupied by forgery of folklore texts. The most famous was the “Kraledvor Manuscript”, authored by the Czech philologist V. Hanka (1817). For about 50 years it was considered one of the most valuable sources for the reconstruction of Slavic mythology. An example of literary mystification of Scottish folklore is “The Songs of Ossian” by J. Macpherson (1760-1763). Of the hoaxers of Russian folklore, I.P. Sakharov (1807-1863) gained the greatest popularity; his “Tales of the Russian People” are still republished and cited by many researchers.

The most striking literary hoaxes of the 19th - early 20th centuries, created by Russian writers and poets, are the following: “Tales of the late Ivan Petrovich Belkin” by A. Pushkin, “Letters and Notes of Ommer de Gehl” by P. Vyazemsky, “Egyptian Nights” by A. Pushkin, completed by V. Bryusov (included in the collected works of Pushkin in 1919), Kozma Prutkov, and in fact A.K. Tolstoy and the Zhemchuzhnikov brothers, Cherubina de Gabriac, invented by M. Voloshin, poet Vasily Shishkov, an “acquaintance” of V. Nabokov, poems by the 19th century poet. V. Travnikov from the archive “found” by Vl. Khodasevich, “The Diary of A. Vyrubova,” created by P. E. Shchegolev and A. N. Tolstoy, N. Nekrasov’s poem “Lights,” “discovered” by E. Vashkov.

A sensation of the 20th century. became a hoax of the French writer of Russian origin Romain Gary (Roman Kasev). In 1956, he received the Goncourt Prize for his novel The Roots of Heaven. In 1974, Gary published the novel "The Big Weasel" on behalf of the writer Emile Azhar. Azhar's second novel, The Life Ahead, wins the Prix Goncourt. Thus, Gary became the only winner of two Goncourt Prizes (it is not awarded twice).

Postmodernism takes literary mystification to a new level, realizing in literature the statement: “nobody writes books,” since “all books are written by no one” (Max Frei / Svetlana Martynchik). The realization that “can there really be literature without mystification” gives rise to literary mystifications proper (the “great Euro-Chinese humanist” Holm van Zaichik / writer Vyacheslav Rybakov and orientalist Igor Alimov) and literary projects based on mystification: Boris Akunin (individual project of Grigory Chkhartishvili), Marina Serova (publishing project carried out by a group of authors).

A hoax in a number of ways coincides with the concept of a pseudonym. The possibilities for using a pseudonym are undoubtedly wider, but it does not have the main specific difference between hoaxes - stylization. Brilliant examples of stylization can be found in the works of Felix Salten, the author of “Bambi the Fawn,” who created memoirs on behalf of the famous Viennese prostitute Josephine Mutzenbacher, and the Norwegian writer and philosopher Jostein Gorder, who published a letter from St. Augustine’s beloved Floria Emilia, allegedly discovered by the author in Argentina, at bookstores.

Thirty years ago, experts and archival workers determined that Adolf Hitler's sensational personal diaries turned out to be a fake. However, this is far from the only hoax that has affected literature, both fiction and non-fiction. Here are the most famous deceptions that have denigrated the history of world literature since the Middle Ages.

The Fuhrer's personal diaries

In 1983, the Stern newspaper published an article about a unique find - 60 small notebooks, which are the personal diaries of Adolf Hitler from the formation of his party in the 30s until the end of World War II. The newspaper paid journalist Gerd Heidemann, who discovered the diaries (in the supposedly crashed plane), a fortune. As soon as fragments of the diaries were published and presented to the German archive workers for review, it turned out that the entries were not only forged, but also extremely crudely forged - the Fuhrer’s handwriting was not similar, pieces of text were stolen from previously published materials, and the paper and ink turned out to be too modern. The fate of the fortune received for the diaries is unknown, but Heidemann and his accomplice were convicted and sent to prison.

The story of Little Tree, a Cherokee orphan boy

The story of a Cherokee orphan who survived a poor childhood under the care of his grandparents was first published in 1976. Presented as a memoir, the story received praise from critics and readers and began to be studied in schools. The first edition sold 9 million copies. In 1991, it turned out that the author of the book was not Forest Carter, but Asa Carter, a famous member of the Ku Klux Klan and ally of George Wallace. Wallace's famous racist line, "Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, and segregation always," was written by Carter. Not only the name of the author turned out to be a fiction, but also the language and culture of the Cherokee tribe, the descriptions of which were criticized by its true representatives.

The Last Adventures of the King of the Wild Lands

The legendary officer, traveler and politician Davy Crockett became the hero of myths and co-author of his own biography. However, pride of place in this list is occupied by a short description of his last adventures before his death during the defense of the Alamo fortress. The book's prologue states that the events were copied directly from Colonel Crockett's personal diary, which only served to establish his status as a folk hero and legendary defender of Texas. Published immediately after Crockett's death, the book became very popular. In 1884, it turned out that the adventure's author, Richard Penn Smith, wrote it in just 24 hours, consulting historical documents, oral legends and his own imagination.

In 1794, William Henry Ireland, the son of publisher and Shakespeare fan Samuel Ireland, presented his father with a unique paper - a mortgage letter signed by the hand of William Shakespeare himself. The shocked father was full of delight, because to this day few documents written by the master’s hand have survived. The younger Ireland announced that he had discovered the document in a friend’s collection and subsequently provided many more documents authored by Shakespeare. Among them were correspondence with Queen Elizabeth I, with the author’s wife, manuscripts of tragedies and even new, unpublished plays: “Henry II” and “Vortigern and Rowena”.

Father and son became popular among London's elite, but not for long. In 1796, Edmond Mellon revealed evidence that the documents were not originals and forced Airend Jr. to admit to forging documents that he created to attract the attention of his strict and cold father.

Autobiography of an eccentric billionaire

In 1971, a little-known writer named Clifford Irving told McGraw-Hill that the famously reclusive billionaire businessman, filmmaker, and aviator Howard Hughes, who had become a recluse more than a decade earlier, had asked him to co-author his autobiography. The publisher could not refuse this opportunity and signed a contract with Irving. Irving almost managed to deceive everyone if Howard Hughes himself had not decided to break his many years of silence. In a telephone interview with a journalist, he said that he had nothing to do with his “autobiography” and did not know Clifford Irving. After exposure, Irving went to jail for 2.5 years.

Deadly fake

Consisting of 24 chapters revealing a secret plan to take over the world's governments by the Jewish elite, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion ranks as perhaps the most dangerous and influential literary forgery in human history. It turned out that the fake document was drawn up by journalist Matvey Golovin, working for the secret police of the Russian Empire. Scholars trace the influence of several unrelated sources in the Protocols, from a pamphlet by Wilhelm Marr and the work of Jewish author Theodor Herzl to an anti-Semitic pamphlet by Hermann Goedsche and a satirical work by a French author ridiculing Napoleon III. Written as the actual minutes of a secret meeting of Zionist leaders in the Swiss city of Basel in 1897, the Protocols reveal a non-existent secret plan to seize power over Jewish-led financial, cultural and governmental organizations.

The impact of the Protocols on history

The publication of these "Protocols" led to brutal repression of the Jewish population in Tsarist Russia and continued during the formation of the Communist Party. The connection between Zion's leaders and the threat of communism led to the fact that the Protocols gained popularity overseas. Automotive magnate Henry Ford, who had previously published anti-Semitic articles more than once, ordered the publication of half a million copies of the Protocols in America. Despite the fact that evidence of the forgery of this collection of documents appeared almost immediately after publication, the popularity of the Protocols only increased. The Protocols were an integral part of Nazi propaganda, and Hitler even quoted them in his book. To this day, many still mistake this literary hoax for a genuine work.

Testament of the Emperor of Byzantium

During the Middle Ages, the conflict between the church and European rulers over power on the continent began to heat up. The Church managed to gain the upper hand thanks to an ancient, but extremely fortunate document that was at hand at the right time. The Veno of Constantinovo turned out to be a deed of gift from Emperor Constantine to Pope Sylvester, which tells of the emperor’s miraculous cure of leprosy and his conversion to the Christian faith. In connection with the acquisition of faith, the emperor bequeathed lands, wealth and control over the empire to Sylvester and the church. Constantine was ready to give up the crown, but the pope graciously renounced worldly power, however, accepting the highest ecclesiastical rank and control over most of the western empire.

Despite the fact that nothing was known about the Donation of Constantine until the 8th century, the church managed to maintain control over power in Western Europe. In the end, the clergy themselves made public the status of this document as fake, although not earlier than the 16th century.

This is a literary hoax text or fragment of text, the author of which attributes its creation to a figurehead, real or fictitious. Literary mystification is the opposite of plagiarism: the plagiarist borrows someone else’s word without citing the author; the hoaxer, on the contrary, attributes his word to someone else. The main difference between a literary hoax and an ordinary text is the creation of an image of the author, within the imaginary boundaries of whose mental, social and linguistic world the work appears. The image of the fake author is embodied in the style of the text, therefore literary hoax always involves stylization, imitation of the literary language of a particular author or imitation of the style of the era, within the boundaries of which the social and cultural idiolect of the fictional author is created. Literary mystification, therefore, is a convenient form both for experimentation in the field of style and for inheriting a stylistic tradition. From the point of view of the type of false authorship, literary hoaxes are divided into three groups:

1. Imitating ancient monuments, the name of the author of which has not been preserved or has not been named (“Kraledvor Manuscript”);
2. Attributed to historical or legendary persons (“Wortingern and Rowena”, 1796, issued by W. G. Ireland for a newly discovered play by W. Shakespeare; continuation of Pushkin’s “Rusalka”, performed by D. P. Zuev; “The Poems of Ossian”, 1765, J. Macpherson );
3. Forwarded to fictional authors: “deceased” (“Tales of Belkin”, 1830, A.S. Pushkin, “The Life of Vasily Travnikov”, 1936, V.F. Khodasevich) or “living” (Cherubina de Gabriak, E. Azhar); for the sake of credibility, the fictional author is provided with a biography, and the real author can act as his publisher and/or executor.

Some works, which subsequently gained worldwide fame, were performed in the form of literary hoaxes (“Gulliver’s Travels”, 1726, J. Swift, “Robinson Crusoe”, 1719, D. Defoe, “Don Quixote”, 1605-15, M. Cervantes; "History of New York, 1809, W. Irving).

An important property of a literary hoax is the temporary appropriation of someone else's name by its author.. The hoaxer literally creates the text on behalf of another; the name is the prototype of language and the only reality of the imaginary author. Hence the increased attention to the name and its internal form. The name in a literary hoax is connected, on the one hand, with the language and architectonics of the text (for example, the testimony of E.I. Dmitrieva about the rootedness of the name Cherubina de Gabriak in the poetic fabric of works written in her name), and on the other hand, with the name of the real author (anagram , cryptogram, double translation effect, etc.). The misconception of the reader and the detection of forgery, two stages of the reception of literary mystification, follow not from the reader’s gullibility, but from the very nature of the name, which does not allow, within the boundaries of literary reality, to distinguish between its real and imaginary bearers. The goal is an aesthetic and/or life-creative experiment. This is what distinguishes it from forgeries, the authors of which are guided solely by mercantile considerations (for example, Gutenberg’s companion I. Fust sold the first Mainz Bibles at exorbitant prices in Paris, passing them off as handwritten books), and deliberate distortions of a historical event or the biography of a historical person. Forgeries of historical monuments (“The Tale of Two Embassies”, “Correspondence of Ivan the Terrible with the Turkish Sultan” - both 17th century) and biographical false testimony (“Letters and notes of Ommer de Gelle”, 1933, composed by P.P. Vyazemsky) are quasi-mystifications.

The history of the study of literary hoaxes began with their collection. The first experiments in cataloging literary hoaxes date back to the period of the late Middle Ages - the beginning of the Renaissance and are associated with the need to attribute ancient texts. Experiments in the attribution of ancient and medieval monuments laid the scientific foundations for textual criticism and textual criticism both in Europe (criticism of the “Donation of Constantine”) and in Russia, where partial examinations of manuscripts have been carried out since the 17th century. By the beginning of the 19th century, extensive material had been accumulated for compiling reference books and classifying types of fictitious authorship: literary hoaxes, pseudonyms, plagiarism, forgeries. At the same time, it became clear that compiling an exhaustive catalog of literary hoaxes is impossible, the science of literature is powerless to verify its entire archive, and philological methods for determining the authenticity of a text, especially in the absence of an autograph, are extremely unreliable and can produce contradictory results. In the 20th century, the study of literary hoax ceased to be exclusively a problem of textual criticism and copyright law; it began to be considered in the context of the history and theory of literature. In Russia, E.L. Lann first spoke about literary mystification as a subject of theoretical research in 1930. Interest in literary mystification was stimulated by attention to the problem of dialogue, “one’s own” and “alien” words, which in the 1920s became one of the central philosophical and philological topics; It is no coincidence that in Lann’s book the influence of M. M. Bakhtin’s ideas is noticeable. The central problem of literary mystification in its theoretical coverage is someone else's name and word spoken on someone else's behalf. Literary mystification is subject not only to changing literary eras and styles, but also to changing ideas about authorship and copyright, about the boundaries of literature and life, reality and fiction. From antiquity to the Renaissance, and in Russia until the beginning of the 19th century, the history of fictitious authorship is dominated by forgeries of ancient manuscript monuments and literary hoaxes attributed to historical or legendary figures.

In Greece from the 3rd century BC. The genre of fictitious letters created on behalf of famous authors of the past is known: the “seven” Greek sages, philosophers and political figures (Thales, Solon, Pythagoras, Plato, Hippocrates, etc.). The purpose of the forgery was often pragmatic: apologetic (giving current political and philosophical ideas greater authority) or discrediting (for example, Diotima composed 50 letters of obscene content on behalf of Epicurus); less often didactic (exercises in rhetoric schools to acquire good style skills). Literary mystification had the same meaning in the literature of medieval Europe and in ancient Russian literature. During the Renaissance, its character changes significantly. Literary hoaxes appear and begin to predominate, attributed to fictitious authors, for which the hoaxer composes not only the text, but also the author, his name, biography, and sometimes a portrait. In modern times, the history of literary mystification consists of uneven bursts, the main of which occur in the eras of Baroque, Romanticism, and Modernism, which is associated with the feeling of the world as linguistic creativity inherent in these eras. Literary hoaxes in modern times can be deliberately humorous and parodic in nature: the reader, according to the author’s plan, should not believe in their authenticity (Kozma Prutkov).