"You opened my... eyes": the history of a letter from a Saransk student to M.M. Bakhtin

The article reconstructs the history of one letter addressed to M.M. Bakhtin, which had been preserved in his personal archive. It was written by a part-time student of the A.I. Polezhaev Mordovia State Pedagogical Institute (now the N.P. Ogarev Mordovia State University) N.N. Andreeva (Kuzovenkova) in February 1949. The letter was published in magazine “Strannik” (2021, No. 2). The article provides information about the author of the letter and about her family. The material of the study is oral memoirs of N.N. Andreeva (Kuzovenkova) about M.M. Bakhtin recorded by the authors of the article in the late 1980s.