Аннотация:This is the first complete publication of Leonid Andreev’s letters to his first lover, Zinaida Nikolaevna Sibileva. The course of their relationships between 1889 and 1892 was stormy and very uneven. The letters reveal a lot of previously unknown features of Andreev’s life as a schoolboy and student. But more important is a certain diary of writer’s “mental states” reflected in them, the stream of his complex, sometimes “borderline” psychological experiences. Believing (with a reference to the authority of Maupassant) that the letters most accurately highlight the personality of a person, that they “reveal the soul without any embellishment,” Andreev at the same time regarded his epistolary opuses (as well as his diaries) as a kind of writing exercise.
