I am sending you the manuscript of “Kolyma Tales” by registered mail. I have not read everything yet. In the December issue of Novyi Zhurnal I will be giving several short stories: “The Package,” “Kant,” “Dry Ration,” “Sententious,” and maybe “Cherry-Brandy,” although the latter has many unfinished details, but it is clearly about Mandelshtam’s death. There are things that are completely bad, for example “The Green Prosecutor.” There are things that require literary processing, such as “The Cross” (it could have been a great story, but it is badly written). In short, thank you very much for letting me read the manuscript. If you don’t publish it in English by March, I may also publish some of the stories in the March volume. The matter is that they are very monotonous and thematically very heavy. Nevertheless, I do think the manuscript is valuable. It would be good to make a small book out of it – about 150-200 pages (no reader will manage to cope with more).
