"Hello, shall we work together? Apart from the stories mentioned in your letter, Ivan Petrovich left many manuscripts, some of which are in my possession, while others have been used by his housekeeper for various domestic purposes. Thus, last winter, all the windows of her wing were covered with the first part of the novel that he did not finish. The aforementioned stories were, it seems, his first attempt. They are, as Ivan Petrovich said, mostly true and were heard from different individuals. However, the names in them are almost all fictitious, created by himself, and the names of villages [...]