Alexei Nikolayevich Apukhtin

Reading notes

• To A. S. Suvorin, 15 November 1891. Moscow. §6 do you happen to know the addresses of the poets Apukhtin and Velichko?

  Aleksei Nikolayevich Apukhtin (1840-1893), a prominent lyric poet and boyhood friend of Tchaikovsky, and Vasily Lvovich Velichko (1860-1904), a younger Petersburg poet and journalist, are both being sought here not for any literary opinion but simply so that the \emph{Sbornik}'s editors -- via Chekhov, via Suvorin -- can write to solicit a contribution from each, exactly as they had already done with Fofanov (\S5) via Professor Anuchin's letter in. The request underscores how much of this charitable-miscellany effort ran on the informal social graph of literary Moscow and Petersburg: an editor needing simply to locate a poet's current address before a solicitation letter could even be sent.