Our university library is very Soviet in its literary tastes. It’s got nothing. There’s one old copy of Jane Eyre. One!
But there are four shelves of John Galsworthy:
For those who don’t know, the English literature ended for the Soviet people with Galsworthy’s work. Nothing happened after him but he was HUGE. It was a big surprise for me that nobody in the English-speaking world knows of him. The Soviet people of my generation and before, though, know his novels by heart. On our first date, N and I debated Galsworthy. I can still quote whole passages.
