Han Ong

It is so far out.

But the people who live in it, the three old women, can in a way be said to in their own way thrive in this setting.

Yes.

Besides a story of flight, I think we could also call this a story of awakening for Boris because it says at one point that he had stopped drawing and then life in the village and the sights of the village sort of reawaken in him the desire to draw again.

and he does three kinds of drawings.

One is of the old women in their daily life, and then one is of still lives, of what the village has to offer, the pickles, the potatoes, which constitute their main food.

So the stillness of his surroundings sort of

awaken him to the desire to capture it all on paper and reawaken his artistic temperament and interest.

So it's a story of flight slash a story of awakening at the same time.

So these twin values are sort of ever present in her cosmology, which is, you know, which is very evident in this story.

Oh, yes.

Let me say that also among the attractions, I forgot to mention when you asked earlier about why I was so attracted to the story and why I was so taken by it, is the fact that the main reason he's being hounded is because of these sacrilegious portraits of worshipers and public monuments made of bologna.

So the good humor is there.

So that's the art of his that we know from the beginning.

And then later on, he puts his hand to sort of just capturing the world around him because he's a drafts person.

And he says in the story that he loves to draw.

And later on, Nikolai Mikhailovich, looking over his trove of portraits, says, I didn't realize what a good draftsman you are.

So it's that lovely respect from a peer of yours, you know, to pay you that compliment and probably among the reasons why.

Besides a kind of a shrugged shoulder of why Nikolai Mikhailovich agreed to shelter him in the first place.

That there is a certain kind of grudging respect from one artist to another.