ABSTRACT
In one of his last letters to Bulgakov, dated 22 October 1939, Pavel Popov cited the case of the nineteenth-century writer Apukhtin who “in his lifetime published none of his prose, yet […] was famed for his readings from his own works.” Savouring the details, Popov regaled Bulgakov with an account of a reading by Apukhtin in the salon of his influential acquaintances, the Ol’denburgsky family (V, 727).1 Despite the illness that was to prove terminal, Bulgakov responded the very next day: ‘Well, that was a disconcerting and consoling letter of yours, my dear Pavel” (V, 599). The fact is that a description of domestic readings of prose works was bound to interest Bulgakov. The tradition of the literary salon, so natural in the nineteenth century but completely unnatural in the twentieth, a century of mass print runs and literary professionalism, was directly relevant to the situation of a writer like Bulgakov who had long since been deprived of contact with publishing houses and the printing process.
