For all you guys who don’t know the lovely Cyrillic alphabet, the books on Aeron’s shelf are a collection of short stories by Alexander Grin and a collection of poems by Anna Akhmatova. He’s reading Still flows the Don by Mikhail Sholokhov.

Back when I read the latter, it provided inspiration for Aeron’s and Eva’s background. And a character in it went into my Collection of Favourite Characters in Novels – Chubatyi. Chubatyi was a funny and somehow weird redheaded guy whom the main character, whose name I’ve shamefully forgotten, met in the army during the war. He couldn’t be assigned to do anything that involved horses, because horses were afraid of him for some inexplicable reason …
Another guy from that collection is Andryusha in Maxim Gorky’s Mother, who has inspired Aeron a bit.