The White Guard
From the album “Illustrations by Sergei Chepik”
Very early, very early, when the sun sent a cheerful ray into the gloomy dungeon leading from the courtyard to Vasilisa's apartment, he, looking out, saw a sign in the ray. It was incomparable in the radiance of its thirty years, in the sparkle of the necklace on Catherine's royal neck, in her bare, slender legs, in her swaying, elastic breast. The teeth of the vision sparkled, and a purple shadow fell on her cheeks from her eyelashes.