Chapter 681: Hemorrhoids - Elder Carter's debut work in the Russian literary world
"Obscene?" Arthur twisted the stem of a candied cherry. "They call a fable about a runaway nose obscene? No wonder you're writing odes to the Moscow censor's hemorrhoids. But then again..."
Gogol slammed the ink bottle on the table, and the ink left a scarab-shaped stain on the parchment: "The point is that those idiots actually said that "The Nose" is not as elegant as "The Martyrdom of Saint Alexi"! They praised that foot-binding ode as "shining with the glory of faith." Ha! In my opinion, it is more like the patina on the Orthodox priest's robes."
"Calm down, Nikolai." Arthur spat the cherry pit into a silver plate. "But the editorial board of The Moscow Observer is really too ignorant. If your nose can be called obscene, I wonder how they will view Mr. Elder Carter's latest work."
"Elder Carter?" Gogol was stunned at first, but then he reacted: "I almost forgot that you and Mr. Carter have been friends for many years. Why? Did he write to you recently?"
As Arthur sat at the table, eagerly awaiting Gogol's comments on the new work by the talented author of "The Englishman", he noticed that Gogol's brows were getting tighter and tighter.
For a moment, Arthur didn't know how to ask the question.
After all, the courage required to take out Elder's new work in public is no less than that required to be shot at under the Tower of London.
And this time, Arthur seemed to have messed up.
Arthur was silent for a long time before he asked softly, "Is this article not to your taste?"
"No, it's not because of that..." Gogol blushed, scratching his head and returning the letter to Arthur: "Look, we are sitting in the British Club, the walls are covered with British countryside landscapes, and the bookshelves are filled with Shakespeare's plays and Wordsworth's poems... But, well, yes, I really don't understand English. Sorry, can you read to me what is written in it?"
It was embarrassing enough to take out Elder's letter in public, and now asking Arthur to read it again was indeed almost asking too much.
However, since he had not much time left in Russia, he had no choice but to choose a more decent way of doing things.
Arthur sighed inwardly, complaining that he had paid too much for his work, but he still invited Gogol to walk into the secluded reading room next door, intending to use Elder's works to teach Gogol what truly obscene literary works are.
Dear Arthur,
Greetings to the son of a bitch Admiralty for the 1588th time this year. May the Father in Heaven protect these Oxford and Cambridge bureaucrats from having sores on their butts so that I can give back to them for the four years of sea life they have given me.
Elder Carter, an outstanding young man who graduated from the University of London, the highest institution of learning in the UK, did not hesitate to leave the bustling London and gave up a lot of opportunities to make money for the sake of lofty scientific ideals and national interests.
He could have held a glass of sweet Tokaji, forked a slice of beef Wellington, and drowned in a barrel of perfume surrounded by fragrance.
But he refused!
He is determined to turn the world upside down through his own efforts!
Even if he only drank beer mixed with water, chewed canned corned beef that was harder than the sole of a shoe, and was surrounded not by beautiful women but a group of rough guys who smelled like rotten fish...
Well, say whatever you want!
There's no one else here who can find me, so why should I pretend to be a moral gentleman? It's ridiculous!
Arthur, what do you think I'm thinking?
After the circumnavigation, the Admiralty would do well to seriously assess the personal sacrifices I made in order to complete the scientific voyage.
Even if you don't knight me, at least you have to keep your promise and transfer me to the Admiralty, and keep me firmly embedded in the cushion of your office chair like Marshal Gambier's buttocks, so that no matter how hard you try, you can't pull me off.
If they don't, then I, Elder Carter, will have to follow the example of Guy Fawkes and John Bellingham and seek justice for myself!
Alas, in such difficult days, there were not many entertainment activities, and I could only rely on counting Charles' hairs to survive the bumpy voyage.
But now, Charles's thinning hair has put my regular pastime to the test. Will his hair fall out first, or will we return to England? Arthur, whose side do you think God is on in this race against time?
Just kidding, in the bet with Charles, I knew I was going to lose.
And yet, Arthur, your letters are one of the few things which have afforded me amusement during this long voyage.
It's a pity that I didn't get to witness the grand event of your 'resurrection' with my own eyes. Although now that I think about it, when I heard that you actually crawled out of the coffin, I thought it was a bad prank played by Alexander and his men on Charles and me, although this prank was indeed very funny in retrospect.
Your experience in France, Hanover and Russia is so rich that it is enviable! Arthur, don't hide it from me. Alexander, the fat man, told me that you are now known as the Liszt of London.
For the sake of our long-term friendship, please tell me the truth. How many noble ladies have you hooked up with in Paris, Göttingen and St. Petersburg?
That’s right!
Don’t get the wrong idea!
I'm just asking how many you slept with!
Damn it, if I had known that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had such benefits, I shouldn't have listened to my uncle's slander and come to the sea to do some crappy high-level job!
The British Ocean!
Haha! Look at that! What a beautiful and pretty phrase!
Look at the endless Pacific Ocean. You can’t even see a single hair. Charles caught three turtles in the Galapagos Islands, but he didn’t catch a female one!
In this situation, what would it matter even if I proclaimed myself the Emperor of the Pacific?
I might as well be a lady's dog. At least the ladies' corgis can be rewarded with expensive ropes!
Oh, Arthur, don't think too much. I'm not saying these words to get angry with you.
However, as I write this, I haven't seen land for more than a month, so you can probably imagine my mental state.
Of course, I know you will definitely blame me for not writing when I am in a good mood and the ship is docked.
But you know me, I had many necessary matters to attend to when the ship docked, and I really couldn't free my hands to write to you.
In your last letter, I was particularly interested in your description of Russia. Before you introduced Russia to me, I had always thought it was an uncultivated and barren land, but it turned out that the charm of Russian literature far exceeded my basic expectations.
In my spare time, I wrote several exercises imitating the tone of Russian novels on the boat. The following one, "Hemorrhoids", is my proudest work. Perhaps you should publish it in Russian newspapers and magazines (of course, the premise is that their publication censorship system is not strictly enforced).
Hemorrhoids
Ivan Karpovich always remembered how that amber dusk was torn apart by his ass.
At that time, he was climbing the stairs of the Winter Palace with the humble attitude of a 12th-rank civil servant - elbows pressed against his ribs, neck bent into the arc of the ruble symbol, nose plowing wet tracks on the glazed floor tiles. The 32 steps were a pilgrimage ritual he had practiced for three months, but at the 28th step, the smell of vodka-pickled herrings penetrated his sneeze.
“A-choo!”
This thunderous sneeze caused his coccyx to have a historic encounter with the bronze base of the statue of Peter the Great.
With the crisp sound of silk pants being torn, something hot suddenly pulsated violently between the buttocks, like a monster hatched by the young clerk in the file bag breaking out of its shell.
"Oh my God!" The colonel of the Guards dropped his sword with a clang. "This medal... could it be..."
Ivan trembled as he reached out his hand to feel around, and felt the relief of a double-headed eagle on his fingertips.
The latest novel is published first on Liu9shuba!
Under the bloodstained hole in the underpants, in the center of the abscess that had swollen to a purple-eggplant color, there suddenly appeared a convex pattern that was exactly the same as the royal emblem.
A tuft of his leg hair was held in the beak of a gilded eagle, waving in the breeze like a St. Andrew's flag.
"Pray to the Holy Spirit!" A countess screamed and fainted, and her whalebone skirt blew down the Easter egg tower three meters away.
The foreign minister's monocle broke into eight pieces, but he still crawled on his stomach and used a silk handkerchief to catch the muddy liquid dripping from the abscess: "Your Majesty is blessed with great fortune, and even the wounds have blossomed into the flowers of the empire!"
The imperial physician Kurchatov's sable cape swept away the wigs of three attendants as he ran. He pointed the gilded spyglass at the bloody mess, and the gray eyes behind the lens burst out with the enthusiasm of a gold digger: "Come and see, gentlemen! This is the ironclad evidence of Academician Pavlov's Sacred Geography of the Human Body! The empire's territory is manifested through human body fluids!"
Twelve clerks lay on the ground recording every twitch of the abscess. The parchment was soaked with cursive writing and had all kinds of horrifying report titles written on it - "Research Report on the Correlation between the Stigmata of the Anus and the Magnetic Field of Imperial Power" and "The Prospects of the Application of Buttocks Heraldry in the Assessment of Administrative Ranks"...
As the Tsar’s bronze carriage crushed the thin ice of the Winter Palace Square, Ivan was hung upside down under a gilded chandelier. Eight crystal candlesticks illuminated his buttocks, and his hemorrhoids drew a strange map of territory under the light.
A certain duke suddenly fell to his knees and sobbed: "Novgorod! I saw the outline of Novgorod!"
"Nonsense!" The Minister of the Keeper of the Seals kicked away the ribbon that was in the way. "This is clearly a map of the Crimea garrison! Look at the location of the pustule, it's the Sevastopol Fortress!"
The front page of the next day's St. Petersburg News read:
The All-Russian Bureaucratic Medical Review Committee was established. After a vote by 300 academicians, Karpovich's anal disease was officially classified as the ninth category of stigmata, enjoying the same embalming treatment as the remains of a saint.
The Tsar's Office has today granted His Excellency Ivan Karpovich a nominal eighth-rank civil servant position, concurrently with the appointment of Chief Minister of the St. Petersburg Hemorrhoid Inspection Department.
The accompanying picture is a close-up of Ivan's buttocks framed in a rosewood frame, with the inscription in the gold frame shining brightly: Here lies the grace of Your Majesty.
…
Gogol's wig slid down half an inch as his shoulder blades trembled, and his shiny hair hung on the manuscript of "Hemorrhoids".
His expression was very strange, and the corners of his mouth twitched like the spring of a pocket watch. Every time the corners of his mouth curled up irreversibly, they would be stubbornly pressed back into place due to force majeure.
The Red Devil squatted on the crystal chandelier and swooped down. He rolled up the manuscript paper that was blown by the wind and looked at it in the firelight. "I bet that the holy oil flowing from the statue of Our Lady of Kazan is more serious than this article. If it is published, the editor's hemorrhoids will probably bloom into the rose garden of the Winter Palace!"
"So you see..." Arthur sprinkled sugar into his snuff bottle. "The Moscow Observer's rejection of The Nose is a complete waste. You're still a long way from being obscene."
Gogol couldn't help laughing. He buried his head and pressed his hooked nose against the table. "If you hadn't brought this letter out, I wouldn't have believed that this article was written by Carter. Fortunately, he is British. If he was Russian, he would be a complete Decembrist in the literary world."
"So what? Do you believe that Carter's article will soon be published in London?" Arthur poured some orange peels into the snuff bottle. "Just because The Moscow Observer doesn't know what's good doesn't mean we don't know what's good. Since you hate the literary maggots in Moscow so much, why don't you consider crossing the Baltic Sea? London booksellers are paying high prices for Slavic fables. If you allow me, I can send the translation of The Nose to The Brit tomorrow, and I guarantee that the pounds you earn will be enough to cover silk cushions in every toilet in Kiev."
Gogol's wig trembled: "You want me to be a literary whore?"
"Watch your language," Arthur said, taking a snuff. "If this were in London, you would probably be fined and put to hard labor for what you just said. There may be prostitutes in St. Petersburg and Moscow, but in London, we only have prostitutes."
"A prostitute? Well, a prostitute is a prostitute." Gogol suddenly lowered his voice, his hooked nose almost poking Arthur's face: "But can they really give two guineas per page?"
"At a time when The Limey is serializing too many realistic themes..." Arthur tapped the saucer with a rhythm that sounded like gold coins falling into a bag, "a good absurd novel is worth this price. But the premise is that we have to give Major Kovalev's nose some exotic flavor, such as letting it escape to Paris in a balloon and open a snuff shop on Montmartre."
Gogol hesitated and wanted to refuse, but the red devil had already jumped onto his shoulder with disdain, and with its tail curled up, it threw the ink-dipped quill into his hand.
"Come on! You little Russian! Pushkin paid for your carriage to the post office. Who spent three hours last week counting coppers in the bedroom to buy the newly arrived Parisian fashions?"
Gogol looked at the manuscript in his hand, recalled his recent experience, and leaned back in his chair dejectedly, looking at the icon on the ceiling and muttering: "Zhukovsky always said that literature is a sacred fire, but my flame seems to be extinguished in the Moscow blizzard..."
Arthur took out a handkerchief and wiped the ink stains on his sleeves. The friction sound of the cloth was very much like the sound of turning over an account book. "Speaking of the Holy Flame, I almost forgot to tell you that this cooperative publishing with London is a collective publishing. Not only you, I also plan to publish many names that you are familiar with. To be honest, I am planning to light a torch across the channel and establish the British-Slavic Literature Association. If all goes well, your works will be listed on the oak bookshelves of major clubs in London alongside Dante and Boccaccio."
"Obscene?" Arthur twisted the stem of a candied cherry. "They call a fable about a runaway nose obscene? No wonder you're writing odes to the Moscow censor's hemorrhoids. But then again..."
Gogol slammed the ink bottle on the table, and the ink left a scarab-shaped stain on the parchment: "The point is that those idiots actually said that "The Nose" is not as elegant as "The Martyrdom of Saint Alexi"! They praised that foot-binding ode as "shining with the glory of faith." Ha! In my opinion, it is more like the patina on the Orthodox priest's robes."
"Calm down, Nikolai." Arthur spat the cherry pit into a silver plate. "But the editorial board of The Moscow Observer is really too ignorant. If your nose can be called obscene, I wonder how they will view Mr. Elder Carter's latest work."
"Elder Carter?" Gogol was stunned at first, but then he reacted: "I almost forgot that you and Mr. Carter have been friends for many years. Why? Did he write to you recently?"
As Arthur sat at the table, eagerly awaiting Gogol's comments on the new work by the talented author of "The Englishman", he noticed that Gogol's brows were getting tighter and tighter.
For a moment, Arthur didn't know how to ask the question.
After all, the courage required to take out Elder's new work in public is no less than that required to be shot at under the Tower of London.
And this time, Arthur seemed to have messed up.
Arthur was silent for a long time before he asked softly, "Is this article not to your taste?"
"No, it's not because of that..." Gogol blushed, scratching his head and returning the letter to Arthur: "Look, we are sitting in the British Club, the walls are covered with British countryside landscapes, and the bookshelves are filled with Shakespeare's plays and Wordsworth's poems... But, well, yes, I really don't understand English. Sorry, can you read to me what is written in it?"
It was embarrassing enough to take out Elder's letter in public, and now asking Arthur to read it again was indeed almost asking too much.
However, since he had not much time left in Russia, he had no choice but to choose a more decent way of doing things.
Arthur sighed inwardly, complaining that he had paid too much for his work, but he still invited Gogol to walk into the secluded reading room next door, intending to use Elder's works to teach Gogol what truly obscene literary works are.
Dear Arthur,
Greetings to the son of a bitch Admiralty for the 1588th time this year. May the Father in Heaven protect these Oxford and Cambridge bureaucrats from having sores on their butts so that I can give back to them for the four years of sea life they have given me.
Elder Carter, an outstanding young man who graduated from the University of London, the highest institution of learning in the UK, did not hesitate to leave the bustling London and gave up a lot of opportunities to make money for the sake of lofty scientific ideals and national interests.
He could have held a glass of sweet Tokaji, forked a slice of beef Wellington, and drowned in a barrel of perfume surrounded by fragrance.
But he refused!
He is determined to turn the world upside down through his own efforts!
Even if he only drank beer mixed with water, chewed canned corned beef that was harder than the sole of a shoe, and was surrounded not by beautiful women but a group of rough guys who smelled like rotten fish...
Well, say whatever you want!
There's no one else here who can find me, so why should I pretend to be a moral gentleman? It's ridiculous!
Arthur, what do you think I'm thinking?
After the circumnavigation, the Admiralty would do well to seriously assess the personal sacrifices I made in order to complete the scientific voyage.
Even if you don't knight me, at least you have to keep your promise and transfer me to the Admiralty, and keep me firmly embedded in the cushion of your office chair like Marshal Gambier's buttocks, so that no matter how hard you try, you can't pull me off.
If they don't, then I, Elder Carter, will have to follow the example of Guy Fawkes and John Bellingham and seek justice for myself!
Alas, in such difficult days, there were not many entertainment activities, and I could only rely on counting Charles' hairs to survive the bumpy voyage.
But now, Charles's thinning hair has put my regular pastime to the test. Will his hair fall out first, or will we return to England? Arthur, whose side do you think God is on in this race against time?
Just kidding, in the bet with Charles, I knew I was going to lose.
And yet, Arthur, your letters are one of the few things which have afforded me amusement during this long voyage.
It's a pity that I didn't get to witness the grand event of your 'resurrection' with my own eyes. Although now that I think about it, when I heard that you actually crawled out of the coffin, I thought it was a bad prank played by Alexander and his men on Charles and me, although this prank was indeed very funny in retrospect.
Your experience in France, Hanover and Russia is so rich that it is enviable! Arthur, don't hide it from me. Alexander, the fat man, told me that you are now known as the Liszt of London.
For the sake of our long-term friendship, please tell me the truth. How many noble ladies have you hooked up with in Paris, Göttingen and St. Petersburg?
That’s right!
Don’t get the wrong idea!
I'm just asking how many you slept with!
Damn it, if I had known that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had such benefits, I shouldn't have listened to my uncle's slander and come to the sea to do some crappy high-level job!
The British Ocean!
Haha! Look at that! What a beautiful and pretty phrase!
Look at the endless Pacific Ocean. You can’t even see a single hair. Charles caught three turtles in the Galapagos Islands, but he didn’t catch a female one!
In this situation, what would it matter even if I proclaimed myself the Emperor of the Pacific?
I might as well be a lady's dog. At least the ladies' corgis can be rewarded with expensive ropes!
Oh, Arthur, don't think too much. I'm not saying these words to get angry with you.
However, as I write this, I haven't seen land for more than a month, so you can probably imagine my mental state.
Of course, I know you will definitely blame me for not writing when I am in a good mood and the ship is docked.
But you know me, I had many necessary matters to attend to when the ship docked, and I really couldn't free my hands to write to you.
In your last letter, I was particularly interested in your description of Russia. Before you introduced Russia to me, I had always thought it was an uncultivated and barren land, but it turned out that the charm of Russian literature far exceeded my basic expectations.
In my spare time, I wrote several exercises imitating the tone of Russian novels on the boat. The following one, "Hemorrhoids", is my proudest work. Perhaps you should publish it in Russian newspapers and magazines (of course, the premise is that their publication censorship system is not strictly enforced).
Hemorrhoids
Ivan Karpovich always remembered how that amber dusk was torn apart by his ass.
At that time, he was climbing the stairs of the Winter Palace with the humble attitude of a 12th-rank civil servant - elbows pressed against his ribs, neck bent into the arc of the ruble symbol, nose plowing wet tracks on the glazed floor tiles. The 32 steps were a pilgrimage ritual he had practiced for three months, but at the 28th step, the smell of vodka-pickled herrings penetrated his sneeze.
“A-choo!”
This thunderous sneeze caused his coccyx to have a historic encounter with the bronze base of the statue of Peter the Great.
With the crisp sound of silk pants being torn, something hot suddenly pulsated violently between the buttocks, like a monster hatched by the young clerk in the file bag breaking out of its shell.
"Oh my God!" The colonel of the Guards dropped his sword with a clang. "This medal... could it be..."
Ivan trembled as he reached out his hand to feel around, and felt the relief of a double-headed eagle on his fingertips.
The latest novel is published first on Liu9shuba!
Under the bloodstained hole in the underpants, in the center of the abscess that had swollen to a purple-eggplant color, there suddenly appeared a convex pattern that was exactly the same as the royal emblem.
A tuft of his leg hair was held in the beak of a gilded eagle, waving in the breeze like a St. Andrew's flag.
"Pray to the Holy Spirit!" A countess screamed and fainted, and her whalebone skirt blew down the Easter egg tower three meters away.
The foreign minister's monocle broke into eight pieces, but he still crawled on his stomach and used a silk handkerchief to catch the muddy liquid dripping from the abscess: "Your Majesty is blessed with great fortune, and even the wounds have blossomed into the flowers of the empire!"
The imperial physician Kurchatov's sable cape swept away the wigs of three attendants as he ran. He pointed the gilded spyglass at the bloody mess, and the gray eyes behind the lens burst out with the enthusiasm of a gold digger: "Come and see, gentlemen! This is the ironclad evidence of Academician Pavlov's Sacred Geography of the Human Body! The empire's territory is manifested through human body fluids!"
Twelve clerks lay on the ground recording every twitch of the abscess. The parchment was soaked with cursive writing and had all kinds of horrifying report titles written on it - "Research Report on the Correlation between the Stigmata of the Anus and the Magnetic Field of Imperial Power" and "The Prospects of the Application of Buttocks Heraldry in the Assessment of Administrative Ranks"...
As the Tsar’s bronze carriage crushed the thin ice of the Winter Palace Square, Ivan was hung upside down under a gilded chandelier. Eight crystal candlesticks illuminated his buttocks, and his hemorrhoids drew a strange map of territory under the light.
A certain duke suddenly fell to his knees and sobbed: "Novgorod! I saw the outline of Novgorod!"
"Nonsense!" The Minister of the Keeper of the Seals kicked away the ribbon that was in the way. "This is clearly a map of the Crimea garrison! Look at the location of the pustule, it's the Sevastopol Fortress!"
The front page of the next day's St. Petersburg News read:
The All-Russian Bureaucratic Medical Review Committee was established. After a vote by 300 academicians, Karpovich's anal disease was officially classified as the ninth category of stigmata, enjoying the same embalming treatment as the remains of a saint.
The Tsar's Office has today granted His Excellency Ivan Karpovich a nominal eighth-rank civil servant position, concurrently with the appointment of Chief Minister of the St. Petersburg Hemorrhoid Inspection Department.
The accompanying picture is a close-up of Ivan's buttocks framed in a rosewood frame, with the inscription in the gold frame shining brightly: Here lies the grace of Your Majesty.
…
Gogol's wig slid down half an inch as his shoulder blades trembled, and his shiny hair hung on the manuscript of "Hemorrhoids".
His expression was very strange, and the corners of his mouth twitched like the spring of a pocket watch. Every time the corners of his mouth curled up irreversibly, they would be stubbornly pressed back into place due to force majeure.
The Red Devil squatted on the crystal chandelier and swooped down. He rolled up the manuscript paper that was blown by the wind and looked at it in the firelight. "I bet that the holy oil flowing from the statue of Our Lady of Kazan is more serious than this article. If it is published, the editor's hemorrhoids will probably bloom into the rose garden of the Winter Palace!"
"So you see..." Arthur sprinkled sugar into his snuff bottle. "The Moscow Observer's rejection of The Nose is a complete waste. You're still a long way from being obscene."
Gogol couldn't help laughing. He buried his head and pressed his hooked nose against the table. "If you hadn't brought this letter out, I wouldn't have believed that this article was written by Carter. Fortunately, he is British. If he was Russian, he would be a complete Decembrist in the literary world."
"So what? Do you believe that Carter's article will soon be published in London?" Arthur poured some orange peels into the snuff bottle. "Just because The Moscow Observer doesn't know what's good doesn't mean we don't know what's good. Since you hate the literary maggots in Moscow so much, why don't you consider crossing the Baltic Sea? London booksellers are paying high prices for Slavic fables. If you allow me, I can send the translation of The Nose to The Brit tomorrow, and I guarantee that the pounds you earn will be enough to cover silk cushions in every toilet in Kiev."
Gogol's wig trembled: "You want me to be a literary whore?"
"Watch your language," Arthur said, taking a snuff. "If this were in London, you would probably be fined and put to hard labor for what you just said. There may be prostitutes in St. Petersburg and Moscow, but in London, we only have prostitutes."
"A prostitute? Well, a prostitute is a prostitute." Gogol suddenly lowered his voice, his hooked nose almost poking Arthur's face: "But can they really give two guineas per page?"
"At a time when The Limey is serializing too many realistic themes..." Arthur tapped the saucer with a rhythm that sounded like gold coins falling into a bag, "a good absurd novel is worth this price. But the premise is that we have to give Major Kovalev's nose some exotic flavor, such as letting it escape to Paris in a balloon and open a snuff shop on Montmartre."
Gogol hesitated and wanted to refuse, but the red devil had already jumped onto his shoulder with disdain, and with its tail curled up, it threw the ink-dipped quill into his hand.
"Come on! You little Russian! Pushkin paid for your carriage to the post office. Who spent three hours last week counting coppers in the bedroom to buy the newly arrived Parisian fashions?"
Gogol looked at the manuscript in his hand, recalled his recent experience, and leaned back in his chair dejectedly, looking at the icon on the ceiling and muttering: "Zhukovsky always said that literature is a sacred fire, but my flame seems to be extinguished in the Moscow blizzard..."
Arthur took out a handkerchief and wiped the ink stains on his sleeves. The friction sound of the cloth was very much like the sound of turning over an account book. "Speaking of the Holy Flame, I almost forgot to tell you that this cooperative publishing with London is a collective publishing. Not only you, I also plan to publish many names that you are familiar with. To be honest, I am planning to light a torch across the channel and establish the British-Slavic Literature Association. If all goes well, your works will be listed on the oak bookshelves of major clubs in London alongside Dante and Boccaccio."
