Quote from the book "The Suitcase / Чемодан. Книга для чтения на английском языке"

This happened eighteen years ago, when I was a student at Leningrad University. The university campus was in the old part of town. The combination of water and stone creates a special, majestic atmosphere there. It’s hard to be a slacker under those circumstances, but I managed. Since there is such a thing as the exact sciences, there must also be the inexact sciences. It seems to me that first among the inexact sciences is philology. And so I became a student in the philology department. A week