Gentlemen and Dogs

"I wrote this story in my early youth, fooling around and playing, over a few days—more precisely, over those 24 days of a writers’ retreat at the artists’ creative house in Gurzuf, where my sister Vera and I lay on the beach from morning till night, laughed, and came up with English names in a race with each other. Why did I want to try my hand at the style of English stories? Because before the trip my friend the poet Rudolph Barinsky gave me a stack of his English-influenced children’s poems—‘so,’ he said, ‘there’d be something to read on the plane.’

I peeked through the pages and was instantly enchanted by all those strawberry puddings, toast slices, gentlemen, esquires, cats and dogs…

…And then the young sun burst through, and the blue moon lit up, and the spires on the tile roofs of that little town in the distance pierced the blue sky. And Mr. Pan Trikitaka looked back, winked at his neighbor, the esquire Smith, and… the story began." Dina Rubina