House-museums

Sergei Alekseevich was a psychologist. He harbored strong feelings against the house-museums and museum-apartments that charged admission throughout greater Russia. "It's unhealthy," he insisted, "to maintain a shrine of someone's home and belongings after they die," he said, "even if they were a famous painter or novelist."

I visited those homemade museums a fair bit. The grandmothers who operated them made you wear shapeless felt slippers over your shoes, so that you would not scuff the floors. The walls were generally hung - crammed, even - with paintings. You could not approach the wall - sometimes you could not even enter the room. So you stood on the threshold, trying to match a painting with its caption, printed in tiny font on a single sheet of paper.

When you burst into the street afterwards, you felt all the more alive.