“Zeus the Benefactor” and “the Born Gamin”: S.A. Vengerov’s Correspondence with K.I. Chukovsky (1907–1914)

For the first time, the article presents the correspondence between S.A. Vengerov and K.I. Chukovsky. It allows us to trace the literary relations between the famous bibliographer, literary historian, and publisher, on the one hand, and the young literary critic, on the other. We reconstruct unknown stories related to Ven- gerov’s attempts to involve Chukovsky in writing literary portraits of V.Ya. Brusov and Z.N. Gippius for the large-scale publishing project “Russian Literature of the 20th Century. 1890–1910” (ed. by Prof. S.A. Vengerov). The article puts forward a hypothesis that Chukovsky’s undated reply to the СBD (Critical and Biographical Dictionary...) questionnaire can be chronologically correlated with the correspondents’ last letters.