In Yury Trifonov's immortal novella “The Exchange” there were two design bureaux, No. 2 and No. 3: the Threes played five-minute blitz chess, the Twos played ping-pong

In Yury Trifonov's immortal novella “The Exchange” there were two design bureaux, No. 2 and No. 3: the Threes played five-minute blitz chess, the Twos played ping-pong. Of course, a more obvious example of the passion for “small tennis” is the duels between the institute staff in “The Most Charming and Attractive”, but that is not the point.

On Sunday I bore witness to a truth from the Moscow Gazette of 1902, “tennis and skating are somewhat neglected, while fencing and ping-pong flourish”, by my own example: having stepped straight out of a fencing class, I stumbled upon a tennis tournament among ladies and gentlemen of the good old Ping Pong Club Moscow at Richter.

They competed in pairs, and I, as a lone wolf, had to abstain from playing, though it was written of me that, like Niels Bohr, playing ping-pong in the library, he never once suffered defeat. It is simply that there is nothing else to do at a research institute. The hardiest won, Kirill Ivanov and Zhenya Borzykh; and all because I had no partner... no pair... no pair of vouchers for a free drink. Shutout Kiselev