"Happiness is not a Gingerbread": Letters of A. A. Smirnov (Treplev)

The hero of this article is A. A. Smirnov (Treplev) (1864–1943), famous Volga writer, public figure and bibliophile of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. He was a friend of M. Gorky and L. N. Andreyev, N. G. Garin-Mikhailovsky and many other writers, artists, etc. The last years of A. A. Smirnov (Treplev)’s life were spent in Kuibyshev-Samara, where he evacuated from Moscow at the beginning of the war and passed away in 1943. The article also focuses on the history of the writer’s archive, discovered by the staff of the M. Gorky Kuibyshev Museum in the early post-war years, which became the basis for a new exhibition at this museum. An appendix includes preserved letters from A. A. Smirnov (Treplev) written during the war in Kuibyshev to his relatives in Moscow and Tashkent.