Boris Solovyev

Sharing a surname ('Nightingale' in English) with Vladimir Solovyev, a C19th Russian nihilist/Orthodox philosopher, Boris is a 5th year geographer at Moscow State University who studies Mink whales in the far Arctic north in his summers. He's also involved in an interconfessional student Christian group, one of a very few student groups in the city's universities.

His room, in the main campus that towers over Sparrow Hills, is small and rather bare, uncarpeted, not very clean (this is not his fault, it was like this when he arrived back a week or so ago), and with a bookshelf he has filled with western Christian books (Schaeffer) and souvenirs of Communism (the collected works of Gorbachev, in English).

He treated me to a very interesting evening, finished off with Caucasian cheese (salty like halloumi, shaped like a rhubarb folded in half, delicious) and tea from the world's most northern tea plantation, a scientific experiment down the road from his parents' house - floral, mild and fabulous.