“I am writing to you, my soul Guskov, on the second day after my arrival in St. Petersburg. There is no need for this, but I would like to share my impressions, as the poet Pushkin said. Petersburg, I will tell you, is a wonderful city, but not at all the way I imagined it. To begin with, everything here is very simple. You get out of the carriage and see a bare, smoky wall. I entered the station - again the bare walls, and also as if they were smoked. And I thought that there is no other way to step here than on carpets, and that at every step the eye is delighted with something grandiose or artistic...” The work is given in the pre-reform alphabet.