The paper, based on the collected Siberian sources, poses in a new way the problem of the genesis of V. Ivanov’s lirerary works in the early 1920s. Study is made of three groups of sources: folkloristic – people’s oral art of Siberian peoples, first of all Russian settlers and Kazakhs; book sources – ethnographic works of the scientists G. N. Potanin and Ch. Ch. Valikhanov; historicalpolitical – the events of the civil war which V. Ivanov saw at the «white» front and which became an important material for the writer’s works about partisans. Revealed as a result of a comparative analysis of the texts of V. Ivanov’s «front sketches» of 1919 and his famous short novel «Armoured
train 14-69» has been a roll-call of themes, motifs, and images. Note has been made of the originality of stating the East-West problem in the said writer’s works.