Recommended reading

J. Cassian has translated Fear, a story by Guy de Maupassant.

P.S. As J.C. points out, Maupassant wrote (at least) two stories entitled La Peur; this one is the lesser known. Knowing that lots of Maupassant have been translated into Russian, and the canonical Russian title for this particular story is Uzhas, I ran a yandex.ru search for Mopassan Turgenev uzhas, and oh! almost all results had to do with yetis and other woolen humans; a Wikipedia writer claimed, “There is a story by Maupassant, Fear, about I.S. Turgenev’s encounter with a female snow-human.” The Wiki article also includes this bit of Socialist Surrealism:

In the 1920s, in Central Asia, several yetis were allegedly caught, imprisoned and — after unsuccessful interrogation — executed by firing squad as basmachi [anti-Bolshevik/anti-Russian guerillas/resistance fighters]. In 1941, V.S. Karapetyan, Lt. Col. of the Soviet Army’s medical service, examined directly a live wild human caught in Dagestan; the animal was shortly executed [or just shot — meaning unclear].

More in the comments at February 30.

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