The Open Door. Seven Cream Jugs

Readers are offered a collection of short stories by the English writer Hector Hugh Munro (1870), better known under the pen name Saki (which in Persian means “wine steward,” “wine server,” and apparently borrowed from the poetry of Omar Khayyam). The Edwardian England in which the author had to live appears on the pages of his prose wrapped in a subtly elusive humor—again and again revealing grotesque, absurd, and sometimes even mystical sides of an ostensibly ordinary and well-off existence. Born in Burma and died during World War I in France, the writer had a special love for Russia, where he lived for about three years, and which became the setting for many of his works.