A Moscow grandee, poet and celebrated writer, Yury Alexandrovich Neledinsky-Meletsky, found a touching and ingenious way to calm the anxieties of his ailing wife over the fate of their only son Sergei, who served in the years of the Patriotic War…

Ekaterina Khovanskaya, like many mothers, suffered terribly when no news came from her son, especially during the main and bloodiest battles, which only aggravated her already extremely frail condition. The son was a noted carouser and simply forgot to write home, for which his father devised a stratagem: he asked him, whenever the chance arose, to send two letters to Moscow at once, one for his mother and the second, a spare, for his father.

The spare letter, naturally undated, contained information of a general nature: the weather, good health, all in some 10 to 15 lines, greetings to relatives, a couple of questions about his sisters, and the news that wartime was passing most agreeably, without any details of campaigns. And when letters were long in coming, Yury Alexandrovich would forward these reserves to his wife, who at once took heart, and so they made it to the end of the war.

In 1813, however, Ekaterina Nikolayevna, poor soul, died in her 51st year, yet she had seen her son and was at peace about his fate.