A jolly, eerie winter, when everything shifted and took off into obscurity.
Also going: Blok, Akhmatova, Sologub, Teffi, Ivnev, ZamyatinMarine engineer, writer, Mandelstam.
When a bomb falls in a Tolstoy novel, it will, invariably, spin around without exploding for a few seconds in front of the hero, and those seconds, for the hero, as in a dream, last months, years - an entire life. See more
Nobody knows anything. Cut off from the world. There is no battle. Silence, once in a while one can see the blue sky. Telephones for private conversations are off. There is rumour of a railway strike. See more
On an ancient English steamboat (which we wouldn’t miss if it were drowned by Germans), I returned to Russia. We reached Bergen after a long fifteen hours, with dimmed lights, in life vests, boats at the ready.