Just as with the Literary Gazette, nothing concrete came of Yunost. Likewise a prestigious periodical—although a monthly magazine rather than a daily newspaper—it was addressed, as its name (Youth) suggested, to young people. So when I came into the waiting hall and saw about a half dozen men there looking like my grandfather, I assumed they were staff, editors and deputy editors, especially as some of them were speaking to one another in low tones. I was told by the secretary to wait there for the poetry editor. Then a youngish man, perhaps in his early thirties, walked in briskly from the street and asked: “All of you boys to see me? Who's first?”—“Let the lad go in! Let him be first!”—said two or three old men all at once, good–naturedly enough but also, I felt, tongue in cheek.

“Don't give me everything,” said the young fellow when I shoved more than half my oeuvre to date at him. “Choose three you think best.”

“You are not untalented,” he said after looking quickly at the three pieces. “But tell me this. Here you write about being betrayed by a friend. Have you ever been betrayed by a friend?”

“No I haven't,” I answered honestly.

“Well, when you are, you'll write about it differently,” he said. “Then come again with new poems.”

There was a postscript to this. Esther Vilensky, my distant relative in Moscow and a student in my department two years my senior, was friends with one of the poetry editor's deputies at Yunost, a young woman in her mid– to late twenties. She showed her my poems and the girl liked them. She was single, and she agreed to meet me—not in the offices in the morning but in town in the evening! This sounded more like a date than a business meeting and raised my hopes both for a publication and a romance. But, as usual, I was late for the date and missed her. She wouldn't agree to give me another chance, no matter how much I begged Esther to intercede on my behalf.