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Do not say, “What’s that? It seems like you’re trying to talk, but all I can hear is a thick, clotty bubbling sound, because you’re up to your eyebrows in the blood of your fellow citizens.”

No memoir can be got under way properly without the introduction of a clotty relative, and the author, who was born into a wealthy St. Petersburg family, recalls with admiration the pre-Revolution pastime of his favorite uncle, who used to lie in bed with a .22 pistol and shoot flies which gathered on the ceiling to eat the jam he had smeared there.

Now, it is said that, when this takes place, the blood contained in the heart is poured into a sac by which it is surrounded; and there it separates into two substances—a clotty substance of the colour of blood and a pure, colourless substance like water.