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Abstract:

In this article, the biography of Zoya Dmitrievna Bukharova (1876 or 1877–1941), an obscure St. Petersburg poetess of the turn of the century, is reconstructed with the utmost (given the present-day state of the available sources) detail. Key to her — if not fate, then at least a psychological portrait — turns out to be the story of her relationship with Vyacheslav Ivanov, which began about 1910 and ended with her confessional letter of 1920, coming from the out-of-the-way corner of Pskov Governorate. The history of their intermittent and deliberately unequal dialogue is essential not only for correspondents’ own life stories but also, above all, for studying the macrocosm of Russian modernism in its interpersonal aspect.