Envy [antikvár]

...Odessa's a colourful place. From over the blue mountain of empty sea ships used to bring foreigners - French, English, Greeks. They divided up Odessa - sometimes with barbed wire. Mostly, with just rows of chairs - these were the boundaries of the land then occupied by the forces of the Intervention. The foreign soldiers used to marvei at your town. The nets they cast over it turnéd out to be like cobwebs: they tore easily. In this town, cut off from the outside world, the young people wrote poetry. Among them was Yuri Olesha. His first poems were published in 1916 in Odesskii listok. However, these poems were like a light bout of measles: a disease everyone has to catch that you soon forget about - as long as you don't catch cold as well. There were poetry societies at which they read their verses to each other. The young poets mercilessly criticized each other because the present was worth nothing when compared to the future. Yuri left school just as the Revolution began. He entered the Novorossiisk University in Odessa and studied there for a year. Everything was undergoing change. The headmaster of his school, who knew Hesiod and Virgil's Georgics, became a shepherd