Taras, Lev, Boris and Me

With the winding down of the first week of teaching, I had a moment to give thought to taking some mementos home to Salt Lake City. I first stopped at a little antiques store underground at the Metro station below my apartment, and inquired about some nice looking bronze statues which I thought might look nice in my judicial chambers. I inquired of the proprietor, a bearded man wearing a leather jacket and smoking a long and very thin cigarette, who one of the statuaries represented. "Lva Tolsoi," he answered. "How much," I said. "800 Dollarov," he said. I thanked him for his time, and headed quickly up to the Literata bookstore just up the street from the Lva Tolstovo Plaza and across from the Taras Schevchenko Park. There I spent an hour or so browsing, and came away with a five volume set of Tolstoy (in Russian, of course), a copy of Schevchenko's masterful poetic work, Kobzar (in Ukrainian), and three volumes from Boris Akunin's Erast Fandorin detective novels (also in Russian). I already feel a kinship with Schevchenko, pictured above writing with a candle in his hand (from the flyleaf of my new book). May my nighttime scribbling also cast its small circle of illumination.