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comments:

• great atmospheric details in the snow storm & ensuing small talk (”keeps even exiles honest”, the “virtue” of the “impartial” blizzard)
• literary flair: opens with mixing of the interior “lamp smoke” with “frost drifing” in from outside. ends with the storm fading and “first faint green of electric light” dangling “like a newly opened question”. (public arc lamps dangling from posts would’ve been a recent deployment, then.)
• more than any other generation, had me looking up its words & references: “Moscow’s zemstvo”, “cultus”, “the Neva”