In Leningrad, on Mokhovaya Street, there was a typical Leningrad apartment house ... and in a typical gloomy Leningrad apartment in this building lived the man who in the first years of the October Revolution discovered for the Soviet reader the wonderful poetry of Cuba. He appeared shy and very pleasant, and it was impossible not to love and respect him. He was very pale, thin, short, with eyes that were kind and as clear as those of children beneath unusually thick eyebrows that almost shaded them. In the apartment there were books everywhere, piled to the ceiling and covering the floors. And they weren't enough for him. You would wait for him for hours, and then he would come back from Liteiny Avenue, where in those days alluring secondhand bookshops crowded both sides of the avenue, hauling home with difficulty a bunch of new books. And those books were greedily unwrapped, opened, and read, when sometimes there was nothing to eat at home. This marvelous Leningrad booklover, known at that time as a Hispanist who knew many languages, was David Isaakovich Vygodsky, a name that was widely known across the ocean. Even today books arrive at his Leningrad address from South America with touching inscriptions...〔Marietta Shaginyan, "Pages from the Past," Politichesky dnevnik #7 (April 1965), in (Antologiya Samizdata ) (in Russian).〕