Fear not, my reader, I shall not speak of Assyrian antiquities. It is true that there are many of them here, but there is nothing special about them for a layman such as myself. They are antiquities like any other: dusty, cracked, labelled and numbered. You look at them, express your admiration for propriety's sake, but in your soul you say: ‘I have already seen all this somewhere before’.

There are simply too many different kinds of rarities here. And it is well known that a rarity which can be found in abundance ceases to be a rarity.

There is, however, in the British Museum something more rare and valuable, which should elicit from you a shout of amazement and delight far exceeding all your previous exclamations!

This thing is small and inconspicuous. It is not even mentioned in the general catalogues. One needs to look long and diligently for it, but that is what makes it so much the rarer, so much the dearer.

Here is its little label. Read it:

‘Tcharka’.

I trust I do not need to translate this English word for you, especially as it is not English at all. The label is attached to a silver shot glass, and I can boldly declare that this shot glass is the only artefact in the British Museum that my homeland is represented by.

A museum which ought to offer a tangible demonstration of the heights of cultural creativity achieved by a given nation, of the degree of its spiritual flowering, of everything that this nation has attained thanks to its genius, at the price of its blood, tears and suffering, of all that it has, step by step, managed to win back from nature – this museum exhibits in its ‘Russia’ section a shot glass – and nothing more.

The Hottentots, the Papuans, the Negritos – every thread of theirs is under the glass, and there are so many of these threads that any European may form an accurate and detailed understanding of their lives. The whole Papuan, from cradle to grave, is in the palm of his hand. But if he asks what goes on in that huge country which has given him Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, is there really nothing more to point him to than our drunkenness?

‘Well, and what are their manners and customs?’ he will ask.

‘Tcharka’.