Following the famous “White Hotel,” D. M. Thomas wrote a pentalogy dedicated to Pushkin, “Quintet of Russian Nights.” Ararat, the first novel in the pentalogy, is structured as a series of nested improvisations. In just two hundred pages, Thomas manages - without once stooping to journalism - to present in his characteristic manner the entire paradigm of relations between East and West in the modern era, offering on one of the improvisational levels his continuation of Pushkin’s “Egyptian Nights”, and in several versions...