“They say and print whatever they want about me... Am I really like that?! Say that I am a hundred times worse - and out of twenty people, ten will believe it. It’s somehow easier to believe a bad person than a good one... Ever since I began to think and reason, I think out loud, and I was always ready to print, publicly, all my thoughts and reasoning. My soul is covered with a transparent shell, through which anyone can easily look into the inside, and all my life I have lived in a glass house, without curtains... Do you understand what this means? That is why I have always had so many enemies! And ardent friends, one of whom was worth more than a hundred thousand enemies! For almost twenty-five years in a row I lived, so to speak, publicly, speaking to the public every day about everything close to them, for almost ten years I did not dismount from my horse, in battles and bivouac smoke, passing, with arms in hand, all of Europe, from Torneo to Lisbon, spending days and nights in the open air, in thirty degrees of cold or heat, and resting in the chambers of nobles, in the houses of citizens and in wretched huts. I lived in a wonderful era, saw centuries-old heroes up close, knew many extraordinary people, looked closely at the seething of various passions... and it seems... I recognized people! I experienced a lot of grief, and only under my family roof did I find true joy and happiness, and finally, I lived to the point where I can say in the face of envy and literary enmity: that all literate people in Russia know about my existence! Much has been said - but this is the absolute truth! These are my rights to speak publicly about what I have seen, heard and experienced in life.” The text is printed in its entirety according to the first and only edition by M. D. Olkhin, in six volumes (parts one to six), St. Petersburg, 1846–1849, with maximum preservation features of this publication a century and a half ago.