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From a letter to Mark Aldanov, August 6, 1943
From Sandy, Utah. In Russian. Unpublished.

WE are living in wild eagle country, terribly far from everything, terribly high up. There used to be mines here, 5000 miners, shooting in bars and all that a captain unknown to the Americans regaled us with in our childhoods. Now there is no one, a rocky remoteness, a "ski" hotel on an open slope (8600 feet high), the grey ripple of aspens amid black firs, bears crossing the roads, mint, Saffron crocus, lupin flowering, Uinta ground squirrels (a kind of suslik) stand upright beside their burrows, and from morning till night I collect the rarest butterflies and flies for my museum. I know you're no nature lover, but all the same I tell you it's an incomparable pleasure to clamber up a virtual cliff at 12000 feet and there observe, "in the neighbourhood" of Pushkin's "God," the life of some wild insect stuck on this summit since the ice ages. The climate here is harsh, icy winds, loud thunder, and as soon as the sun beats down, painful blackflies stick to one -- which they especially enjoy when you go dressed as I do in nothing but shorts and tennis shoes; but the collecting here is magnificent, and I have rarely felt so good.

[Bakhmeteff Archive, Columbia University]

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