In 1922, university physiology students had a summer internship near Peterhof in the former royal residence, “our beautiful Alexandria,” as they called it. At that time, A. A. Ukhtomsky began a short correspondence with I. Kaplan, and later (from 1927 to 1941) he actively corresponded with his students E. Bronstein-Shur and F. Ginzburg. The range of scientific and moral problems in the published letters of those years was quite diverse - from the law of dominance and the concept of “chronotope” to the secrets of the psychology of creativity and Tolstoy’s question: “Why do people write?”