Three Addresses on Mokhovaya: Afterword to the History of the Publishing House “World Literature” (Based on the Materials from the A.M. Gorky Archive)

The article publishes letters from employees of the publishing house “World Literature” David Vygotsky, Sergei Kolbasyev and Isai Mandelstam, stored in the A.M. Gorky Archive of the Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The letters, written in the 1930s, supplement the known facts of their biographies with new details. Gorky’s correspondents living on Mokhovaya Street in Leningrad are united not only by the address, but also by the tragic fate of the repressed. Two letters from David Isaakovich Vygotsky, a poet, translator and literary scholar, specialist in Spanish and Latin American literature, reveal episodes of his constant collaboration with Gorky, which lasted for many years. The letter from the marine writer and naval commander Sergei Adamovich Kolbasyev, who found himself in a difficult situation, gives hope for Gorky’s participation in the writer’s fate. The third letter is from Isai Benediktovich Mandelstam, one of many letters from those administratively exiled from Leningrad in 1935, when Gorky’s intervention in the fates of the repressed became impossible. The letters are published from autographs and authorized typescripts.