“To Sizoy Mother, Moscow the White-Stoned, for my long wandering away from her… I greet her with good health and send a low bow to all her four wide sides.
For more than a year I’ve been wandering in different places, but nowhere have I seen what I love so in Moscow—that is her back streets, far from the center, that I once somehow called ‘virginal,’ with their such alluring, striking and distinctive poverty of heart…»