A man walks alone on the ice, with fog around him. It seems to him that he is walking straight. The wind will disperse the fog: the man sees the goal, sees his tracks. It turns out that the ice floe floated and turned: the track is tangled into a knot - the man is lost. I wanted to live honestly and decide not to shy away from difficult things, but I confused my path. Making mistakes and going astray, I found myself in exile, in Berlin. This story is told by me in the book “Sentimental Journey,” which we have published twice; I’m not republishing it now. All this happened in 1922. I was homesick abroad; a year later, thanks to the efforts of Gorky and Mayakovsky, I managed to return to my homeland. The book you are about to read was written in Berlin, and here it is being published for the fourth time.