"Here is Monsieur Kranitski," she said. She introduced us.
"I have been walking to the end of the park," he said. "It is curious, but that side of the park with the dry lawn-tennis court, those birch trees and some straggling fir trees on the hill and the long grass, reminds me of a Russian garden which I used to know very well."
I said that when people had described that same spot to me I had imagined it like the descriptions of places in Tourgenev's books.
He said I was quite right.
I said it was a wonderful tribute to an author's powers that he could make the character of a landscape plain, not only to a person who had never been in his country, but even to a blind man.
Kranitski said that Tourgenev described gardens very well, and a particular kind of Russian landscape. "What I call the orthodox kind. I hear James Rudd, the writer, is staying here. He has a gift for describing places: Italian villages, journeys in France, little canals at Venice, the Campagna."
"You like his books?" I asked.
"Some of them; when they are fantastic, yes. When he is psychological I find them annoying, but one says I am wrong."
"He is too complicated," Miss Brandon said. "He spoils things by seeing too much, by explaining too much."
I asked Kranitski if he was a great novel reader. He said he liked novels if they were very good, like Miss Austen and Henry James, or else very, very bad ones. He could not read any novel because it was a novel. On the other hand he could read any detective story, good, bad or middling.