Аннотация:The article deals with the unknown correspondence of outstanding Russian writer Mark Aldanov with his young friend, professor of Columbia Un., Leon Stilman. The information about this scholar is rather limited. There are some lines about him from a book of essays (Gogol from the Twentieth Century. Eleven Essays. Selected, Edited, Translated and Introduced by Robert A. Maguire. Princeton Un. Press, 1974): "Leon Stilman left his native St. Petersburg a year after the Revolution, settled in Paris, and practiced law there for two decades. In 1941, he moved to the United States, and embarked on what was to prove a distinguished academic career, first at Cornell and then at Columbia, where he earned a PhD, rose to a full professorship, and became chairman of the Department of Slavic Languages. He has produced several successful textbooks and has written on Karamzin, Pushkin, Goncharov, Tolstoy, and, most extensively, Gogol".
It is very important to introduce him to the Russian readers because he was a very clever self-made man. The correspondence was found in Columbia University, The Butler Library, The Bakhmetev Archives (BAR) and it allows learning about the life of those outstanding people and their working on the Russian Anthology.