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[...] the sense of leaving Russia was totally eclipsed by the agonizing thought that Reds or no Reds, letters from Tamara would be still coming, miraculously and needlessly, to southern Crimea, and would search there for a fugitive addressee, and weakly flap about like bewildered butterflies set lo…

[...] During that last summer in the country, we used to part forever after each secret meeting when, in the fluid blackness of the night, on that old wooden bridge between masked moon and misty river, I would kiss her warm, wet eyelids and rain-chilled face, and immediately after go back to her fo…

[...] As I reached the top, my livid light flitted across the six-pillared white portico at the back of my uncle’s mute, shuttered manor—as mute and shuttered as it may be today, half a century later. There, in a corner of that arched shelter, from where she had been following the zigzags of my asc…

Autumn came early that year. Layers of fallen leaves piled up ankle-deep by the end of August. Velvet-black Camberwell Beauties with creamy borders sailed through the glades. The tutor to whose erratic care my brother and I were entrusted that season used to hide in the bushes in order to spy upon …

In my foolish innocence, I believed that what I had written was a beautiful and wonderful thing. As I carried it homeward, still unwritten, but so complete that even its punctuation marks were impressed on my brain like a pillow crease on a sleeper’s flesh, I did not doubt that my mother would gree…