Alexey Tolstoy returned from emigration in 1923. He settled in Petrograd, and a close circle of writers, artists, and theatre professionals immediately formed around him. Konstantin Fedin was also a member of this circle of creative intelligentsia. His acquaintance with Tolstoy was initially carried on in correspondence.

They often saw each other and paid each other visits. In addition to Tolstoy and his wife Natalya Krandievskaya, their shared circle of friends in Leningrad included writer Vyacheslav Shishkov, famous Pushkinist Pavel Schegolev, composer Yuri Shaporin, artists Nikolai and Nadezhda Radlova and many others. The group often gathered at Tolstoy’s, first in Leningrad, and after 1928 – in Tsarskoye Selo, where he spent nine years before moving to Moscow.

The photo has captured one of the meetings at Tolstoy’s house. The owner of the house and his wife are pictured in the centre of the photograph. The first from the right is Konstantin Fedin. Judging from how the table is still nearly empty and there are children in the room, the evening has only just begun. The Tolstoy feast would normally end well after midnight. Tolstoy loved entertaining guests and knew how to do it right. As Irakliy Andronikov would recaled, ‘there were too many guests in the house to count’. Lunches would be arranged for particular occasions, though more often for no reason at all, ‘for the sake of the opportunity to have guests and treat them to the largesse of the Roman nobleman Lucullus, receiving inexplicable pleasure from these treats’.

Those evenings would remain in the memory of those who had been there for a long time. On 24 February 1945, the day after Tolstoy’s death, Fedin wrote in his diary: “An entire era for me has been connected with Alexey – twenty years full of serious interaction in art, friendship, acquaintanceship, quarrels, making up, cooling down and outbursts of attachment […] his main strength was carnal adoration of life. No one knew how to describe the happiness and thoughtless joy of being like him. […] Among Russian writers, he was therefore a rarity. “I would like that to drink as much for the repose of his soul as we drank while feasting together…”