From the author

In my literary destiny there was, strictly speaking, only one event: in 1970 I realized that I was a conservative. Novelty, extolled as a virtue by everyone around me, suddenly lost all value for me, and I decided not to be ashamed of it. I realized that I didn’t want originality, but accuracy and naturalness - and that from now on no one could expel me from my strict paradise. I understood naturalness as following tradition, not nature. I was 24 years old then. By that time I had been writing poems for 18 years, and now I threw away all previous experiences and started all over again.

Until 1984, I lived on the banks of the Neva, for the next five and a half years - in Jerusalem, and from the end 1989 living in London. From 1972 to 1975, I managed to publish several times in Soviet magazines. In 1981, my poems came to the West by gravity and were published in Paris. Not long before this, I went from being a researcher to becoming a fireman.