письмо Учителю
 

Dear Teacher,

The world is obviously a small place.

This lack of room or some other reason beyond my comprehension has densely pressed and interlaced all with anything else as well as everything with nothing and also with itself weirdly interweaving hard facts of virtual reality with imperceptible nebulous fabric of schizo-visionary inexpressible inexplicable and in-transmittable images and ideas.

Grotesque figures of a shadow-theater projected upon slowly whirling whiffs of shifting fog.

Wanna some proves of co-existing no less than a couple of worlds in this here small place?Lots of them!

Just one example.

Late July 1997, Nezhin-town, the Ukraine. A man in his mid-forties visits the house and family of his teacher, is fed and entertained for two days and then seen off at the railway station.

What was his most clinging conception of himself at that period?

That of an eel or salmon or some other species of the honorable class of Pisces returning after a certain number of years spent in faraway Sargasso or anything else's seas to the places he originated from with the only aim to do its spawning (the half-baked rendering of Joyce's Ulysses), the concluding act in his span of life: my quota is done, let me become one with nature.

And what do you think your incomparable spouse, my beloved Maria Antonovna provided as tit-bits for that sissily mincing melancholic cod-fish?

Red caviar! On buttered slices of bread. What a delicious treat! Thank you ever so much.

Now go and talk about single-facetedness of this world! Three dimensions they said? Pity the poor souls.

Another thing that bewildered me about you and your family is your unchangeability.

In Konotop and Nezhin I was roaming along so well known to me streets and lanes overwhelmed with uncanny feeling of getting into some dreamy doll-land; everything in its place but shrunk to their half-size (except for the new building bobbed up during my absence), the effect, perhaps, was caused by the trees grown high up in the course of the recent ten years.

As for the friends of my youth, I had to discern them through the cob-web of wrinkles on their faces to adapt to their present forms and countenances (a fairly speedy process, I must admit). The only place where the adaptation efforts were saved was by you (excluding your grandson: the fair-headed seven-year-old child I indistinctly recollected had transformed into a closely cropped body-building youngster and, as it turned out, a talented painter).

By the way, the evening you took me to his and his parents apartment I was not projecting or trying to apply any sort of that psycho-analytical trickery after your introductory foreword on the sidewalk near their block-of-flats. Far from that! I had been just having fun looking at the pictures I did like and talking to a funny muscular lad.

Thank you for all that and for all you have done for me since you became my Teacher.

Please, pass my love to Maria Antonovna and best regards to the Didencoes.

Sincerely yours`

Sehrguey

P.S. Are you sure Tyoutchev was 100 percent serious in his poem on Russian Geography? Is not a case of the tongue in cheek?