The frost is felt physically and inwardly. It is in the air, in a horse’s breath, in frozen houses — as a substance that makes living difficult. We see winter Irkutsk through the eyes of local artists and poets: “Irkutsk is a strange city, somehow mystical; it lays a person bare, reveals all their great and small abilities, but offers no way out. It is a city of cranks and neurasthenics striving for the wider world, or of the humble, for whom it is a capital, a Mecca, a holy place.”
