A (not wholly) fictional story It was the summer of 1974, and as a young student, I was attending a course in St. Petersburg, then called Leningrad. I lived near the Mayakovskaya metro station, on Nevsky Prospekt, near the train station to Moscow, and was dating an American girl whose presence would later cross my entire life. Up until then, when we said goodbye, we exchanged kisses on the cheeks, avoiding touching our lips by twisting our heads to the point of risking a stiff neck. But things were different that evening in front of the Dom Knigi (house of […]