Information about the author:
Elena I. Pogorelskaia
Elena I. Pogorelskaia, PhD in Philology, Researcher, А.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Povarskaya 25 a, 121069 Moscow, Russia.
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0668-7320
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Abstract:
The letter of the French actress Andrée Ducret (1902–1982) to A.N. Tolstoy dated October 1, 1928 and kept in the Department of Manuscript Collections of the V.I. Dahl State Museum of Fine Arts, opens a previously unknown contact of the writer during his exile in Paris and adds curious details concerning his life in the French capital in 1919–1921. This document reveals a number of details about the biography of the actress herself: her performances on the stage of Théâtre Antoine in Paris in the summer of 1920, acquaintance with Vasily Vyrubov and Isaac Babel, membership in the Communist Party of France since 1923. Important in the letter is the mentioning of enthusiastic reviews of Tolstoy’s works in the Humanité newspaper, an article Soviet Literature in 1927 probably printed on November 14, 1927 where there is a fragment devoted to Tolstoy and his novel The Eighteenth Year.