This is a photo of Alexander Guriev, who was considered my fiance, when I studied at school and at the university. But then the Great Patriotic War started, and everybody's plans changed. This photo was taken in Leningrad in the 1940s.
After the war I returned to Leningrad. I couldn’t go back to our apartment, because it wasn’t empty, somebody occupied it. All our furniture was taken out and given to the ‘dvornik.’ So for a while I lived at my school friend Irina’s, till our friend Tatiana made us argue. Then I met the mother of my ex-fiancé Alexander, Vera Alexeevna Gurieva, and she offered me to live together with her. She had only an eight-square-meter room in a communal apartment in the building, standing just near our house. So we lived together. My school teacher, Linnik, gave us some wood to warm it up.
Alexander was fighting during the war, he was taken prisoner, they told me that he was killed, but I didn’t tell his mother. She had got a notification that he was just lost and didn’t send any information about him to his military unit. Anyway, Alexander came back in a couple of years, he said that after he had been taken prisoner, the Soviet authorities put him in jail too, and he worked as a coalman. There he got married. We still have very friendly, warm relations, we are almost like relatives, and it was him, who turned my attention to music, he made a music lover out of me. And he became a geologist under the influence of my husband.
