A.L. Tolstaya (Bostrom) as an Author of Books for Children and Adolescents (Experience in Reconstructing Creative and Publishing Strategies)

This article attempts to reconstruct the relationship between the writer A.L. Tolstaya (Bostrom) (1854–1906) and her publishers. The aim of this study is to analyze the particular case of a provincial writer’s entry into the world of metropolitan literature and to identify general patterns of interaction within the writer-publisher paradigm at the beginning of the 20th century. Having visited St. Petersburg several times in the first half of the 1900s, the writer A.L. Tolstaya (Bostrom), who lived in Samara and wrote for the local press, made considerable efforts to enter the so-called big literature. For this purpose, she met editors and publishers, corresponded with them, attended literary evenings, and so on. Her circle of acquaintances and correspondents during these years included, among others, the St. Petersburg publishers N.N. Morev, O.N. Popova, and L.M. Wolf. This cooperation resulted in the release of several individual books by the writer, as well as the publication of her works in periodicals for children and adolescents. The correspondence between A.L. Tolstaya and her husband, A.A. Bostrom, allows us to trace all stages of this interaction, based on a thorough examination of the unpublished family epistolary of A.A. Bostrom and A.L. Tolstaya, which is kept in the Department of Manuscripts of the Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences and in the Samara Literary Memorial Museum named after M. Gorky.

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