"To replace Gusev, Chertkov sent Father a new secretary toward the end of January. This was a student by the name of V. F. Bulgakov, a jolly, buoyant youth, a bit in love with himself."
Valentin Fyodorovich Bulgakov was the last secretary of Leo Tolstoy and his biographer. He served as the director of several literary museums and actively participated in Tolstoyan and pacifist initiatives. He endured imprisonment under the Tsarist regime and internment in a Nazi concentration camp. For the last 20 years of his life, he assumed the role of the head at the Yasnaya Polyana museum.
"The former [Chertkov] aims at the moral destruction of Tolstoys wife in order to get control of his manuscripts. The latter [Alexandra] is either in conspiracy with him or, with typical female antagonism towards the mother, devotes herself to the struggle as to a kind of sport."