The «Slavyansky Bazaar» (Славянский базар), the restaurant the narrator’s upperclassmen once bragged about crashing, was one of pre-revolutionary Moscow’s most celebrated establishments — and the site of a genuinely historic meeting. On June 22, 1897, Konstantin Stanislavski and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko sat down at the Slavyansky Bazaar for a conversation about the state of Russian theater that reportedly ran some eighteen hours, without a break, and ended with the two men agreeing to found the Moscow Art Theatre together. The restaurant itself did not survive the Soviet period intact, but its name remained shorthand for a certain vanished grandeur of old Moscow — which makes it a fitting, if surely unintentional, echo of the toast to «the great Nemirovich» and «the great Danchenko» a few pages later in this same night out.