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

Yekaterina Khovanskaya, like many mothers, suffered greatly when no word came from her son, especially during the chief and bloodiest battles, which only aggravated her already very frail condition. The son was a notorious carouser and simply forgot to write home, so his papa devised a stratagem: he asked him, when the occasion offered, to send two letters to Moscow at once, one to his mother, the second, a spare, to his father.

The spare letter, naturally undated, contained matters of a general nature: the weather, the state of his health, all in some 10-15 lines, bows to relatives, a couple of questions about his sisters and the announcement that wartime was passing in the most agreeable manner, without any details of campaigns. And in the long absence of genuine letters, Yury Alexandrovich would forward these spares to his wife, who at once took heart. So they limped along to the end of the war.

In 1813, however, Yekaterina Nikolayevna, poor soul, died in her 51st year, having seen her son and being at peace about his fate