This year's text for the "Total Dictation" will be written by the author Marina Moskvina

This year's text for the "Total Dictation" will be written by the author Marina Moskvina. I am scarcely acquainted with her work, but I remembered a charming story that contained this sentence:

"Every Saturday I hoped that Dad would stay at home, that we would go to the shooting gallery and take out a pedalo… But my dad couldn't; every Sunday he went to his classes on the study of flying saucers."

It is an interesting story, one might even call it edifying, about extraterrestrials, or rather about a father whom a houseplant advised to travel to Shambhala; but his wife and son talked him out of it, and he enrolled instead in a circle for the study of flying saucers. And then they started grumbling at him anyway, nagging him and taking offence that he was forever busy with his circle. What business is it of yours, one might think, to distract a man from weighty matters. And then it emerged that the mother was herself an extraterrestrial, who turned into a glowing pancake and flew out of the window. True, at the end she came back, with a string bag of cucumbers. "I can't very well leave you," she says.