Has anyone seen this book in their library?
It was written by Arkady Vasilyev. A comedy film was made from the story, too. You know the plot: swindlers of every stripe, traders, restaurateurs, butchers, railway station employees and various other rogues found a joint-stock partnership, a sort of secret society of fraudsters and plunderers of socialist property. The chief item on the agenda is the production of sausages and frankfurters in an underground workshop and the many thousands to be earned from selling them.
Our main principle is moderation and tidiness. We cannot take all the money. Personally, I should like to live to see communism. Our sphere of activity is sorting discrepancies
says the chairman of the lodge at the meeting.
It is a funny thing, though the realities are quite different now. But there are plenty of points of contact: the OBKHSS (the Soviet anti-embezzlement police), organised groups of corruptionists, and the search for a respectable fool.
But I am not telling you this so much for the sake of the film column, although for anthropological purposes one may well have a look at a vanished way of life.
My point is that the writer Arkady Vasilyev, who also wrote "Boldly, Comrades, in Step", stories about Mikhail Frunze, "At One O'Clock in the Afternoon, Your Excellency" and "There Is Such a Party", was none other than the father of the writer Darya Dontsova, born Agrippina Vasilyeva.
