In the evening we went together to Kislovodsk, where Koshetz was appearing in Halévy's La Juive. Koshetz's generous description of this opera, which I did not know at all, was that it was a pseudo-classical opera. In fact it turned out to be technically speaking such a hopelessly inept piece of work, so dramatically clumsy, so wooden in its character development, that when to those defects were added a bad production and a feeble cast of principals (except Koshetz), it was all I could do not to rush from the theatre.