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Abstract:

The article is about one of the episodes related to Alexei Tolstoy in the life of literary Petersburg in the late 1900s. In 1909, a young writer who returned from Western Europe was introduced to V.I. Ivanov. When visiting the “tower” in a conversation about anthroposophy and anthroposophists, he made a mistake, which he wrote about at the same time in a letter to his friend M.A. Voloshin. Subsequently, this story was mentioned in the book by I.G. Ehrenburg People, years, life. The source of the information contained in it, according to the author himself, was Voloshin’s story. The article is devoted to the analysis of this text, which sounds like a classic literary joke, in the context of Tolstoy’s biography and his relationship with the representatives of literary Petersburg in the 1900s.