Have you noticed that good doesn’t tolerate shoddy quality? You can be sneaky, bold, a swindler—but being willing to do things half-heartedly isn’t possible. Tatyana Lugovskaya belongs to those people who, by definition, can’t stand the suffix “-ovat.” Working “poorly” doesn’t appeal to her, and “goodly” (i.e., with “-ish” quality) is simply not allowed. So the only option is to work well.
An artist. The sister of that V. Lugovskaya who is in the school reader “And so the song about the wind begins…” A well-groomed, well-fed bourgeois woman—one of the few (fairly stingy) responses online. Her unfinished memoirs, first so solid, focused, and extended, start branching off into stories by the hearth, private letters, and notes—fragments of a diary…