From the author:

All my life... no, why lie: from the age of 35 I dreamed of working in an archive. I dreamed, of course, of the archive of Russian literature at Columbia University; but about this - why lie? - I didn’t really dream: I just dreamed a little. I understood that this would not happen. I would agree to any, almost any archive... but a literary one would be better. Meanwhile the years passed; the dream was fading...And suddenly it turned out that not all was lost. I looked around me and saw that there was an archive about my soul: my own. Of course, I am nothing more than I, but my face is not water to drink; what has grown has grown; and literature, whatever it is, is here. All my life I have composed a little; published, perhaps even a little more than a little. I didn’t keep a Don Juan list, I gave it up when the titles exceeded three hundred, but I can still vouch for a thousand publications, even though everything goes to one place... it’s a pity that it doesn’t go to two. I am nothing more than me; but for whom are we writing? How is a fictional hero better than a living one, a survivor? Wouldn’t a complex hero be similar to me, based on my experience? Every novelist first writes about himself, and then also about himself. It is nonsense that it is more difficult to invent than to peer into the past. On the contrary: with something made up, do what you want, but with yourself, diaries and letters are not allowed. Look how many of them have accumulated over half a century: Mt. Try to figure it out. Also, try to believe that “that one over there is me.” Did mom love this? In essence, another person looms. Doesn't look like me at all. But studying the monument (every Schliemann will tell you this) means destroying it. You stick a shovel into a hill - and the hill is already different, and with it - you. Every observer, physics teaches us, influences the object of observation. A small object does not imply a small observer. Besides, the dog could have grown up during the journey... I’m starting from the end: with how I left Russia in the year of Orwell... no, no, don’t correct me, I know better. (“Keep Hemingway” too; that’s right – Hemingway.) I left in the year of Orwell and Amalric. To those who remained, he said goodbye: “In four years there will be bare bottoms here” - and he was mistaken by two years. Amalrik was wrong by seven years. By how many years Orwell was mistaken, I have no way of knowing... which, thank God.