Ganin remembered how he received this letter, how he walked on that distant January evening along the steep stony path, past Tatar icehouses, crowned here and there with horse skulls, and how he sat by the stream, its thin streams washing over the smooth white stones, and looked through the finest, countless, remarkably distinct twigs of a bare apple tree against the pinkish-glowing sky, where shone, like a transparent nail clipping, the young moon, and next to it, at the lower horn, trembled a bright drop - the first star. (Vladimir Nabokov, "Mary") Dear friends, on April 10 (22), [...]