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gigantic pencil that might be taken to suggest the woman’s profession, her relationship to the world of letters. Couldn’t the initials V.V., for Vera Vasilievna, be a key that we should invert to read A.A. (Anna Andreyevna), the specular image, the Grad Kitezh, the Saint Petersburg that lies beneath the waters?
    Before leaving the store, I acquired a lovely lorgnette that Nabokov, in Speak, Memory, had given up for lost. (Says Nabokov: That lorgnette I found afterward in the hands of Madame Bovary, and later Anna Karenin had it, and then it passed into the possession of Chekhov’s Lady with the Lapdog and was lost by her on the pier at Y ALTA . ) But I found it there amid the jumble of history. There can be no doubt that by 1907—the year of the postcard—such lorgnettes were long out of style. This one might have had a place in V.V.’s parlor, displayed on the piano as an exotic touch. Such lorgnettes had the heft and presence of those old instruments of measure that allowed a very ample margin of error but—since they operated by the confrontation of analogous magnitudes—also granted a more intimate knowledge, one that cannot be achieved with a pair of these dehumanized modern glasses made of plastic.

D
    D ACHA (дáча). In 198* I lived for a long while in a small town, practically a village, next to a wide river. In the afternoons, I would stroll down to its bank and, captivated by the grandeur of what was virtually an immense inland sea, would spend hours admiring the beauty of the landscape. Sometimes, for a long second, there appeared before me all the good books I would one day write: a precise vision of my future fragmented not into days but into the works that would someday appear under my name. What remained was the annoying task of writing them. (In the winter, a meter-thick layer of ice could support the weight of trucks loaded with wheat, and there, again, was I, observing the scene, amazed that they didn’t plunge straight to the bottom of the river: truck, driver, and grain.)
    To live there was like dwelling in a DACHA on the outskirts of some large city on the outskirts of the world. I knew that not far from Moscow a town of DACHAS had been built for writers loyal to the IMPERIUM , where they’d spend their summers, each and every one describing the flight of the selfsame grouse, the same rosy-fingered dawns. So strong was this custom of writing in DACHAS that, even when they became fugitives from the IMPERIUM and were declared to exist outside its laws, many writers took refuge—for what occult reason I know not—in DACHAS . The fearsome Solzhenitsyn completed his blood-curdling circumnavigation of the Archipelago in a dacha that belonged to Rostropovich, the famous cellist. The beautiful Anna Akhmatova lived out the end of her days in something like a small DACHA , the “cabinin Komarovo” which, according to her biographers, at last accorded her the peace of a home of her own. Finally, the entire Pleiades of the IMPERIUM’S bad writers (such as Yevtushenko, Mijalkov, and a very bad one indeed, Bondarev) lived in DACHAS where, as if thereby constricted or encumbered, they slipped into a comfortable prose, the flight of the selfsame grouse, the same rosy-fingered dawns.
    Perhaps private DACHAS still exist—it would appear that Alexander Isaievich (Solzhenitsyn) inhabits one in a Vermont BOSCAGE —but I maintain that the DACHA-IST era had a negative impact on Russian literature. (In self-justification, certain Pushkinists—all of them owners of dachas—paint Pushkin’s retirement in Mikhailovskoe during the autumn of 1825, a period that can obviously be characterized as DACHA-IST , as a time of superproductivity. And therefore, if Pushkin himself . . . That is, given that we find traces of DACHA-ISM in this genius, too, et cetera .)
    I, too, had my DACHA-IST period, and to be perfectly honest, I’ve never written more or better. I would get up every morning . . .

E
    E STEPA (