Coyote Vision

There is a Russian joke from the post-Soviet period:

“I was born in St. Petersburg. I came of age in Petrograd. My adult and working life was spent in Leningrad. Now that I am old, I am spending my last years and expect to die in St. Petersburg.”

This suggests that someone should write a novel about a man who was born in 1910 and died in 1999 in St. Petersburg, always living in the house where he was born. He was a poet and writer who knew the musical and literary personages of the 20^th Century. The whole history of the 20^th Century happened to this man in the place where he lived, including the Siege of Leningrad. In particular, the novel would trace the arc of Russian history through the Soviet experience and back.