“Where did such a long introduction come from, seemingly completely superfluous, extraneous to my “book of experiences”, not related to it in any way, cannot be explained... After all, we are talking about my parents, about their love. I tried to begin with a description of the family hut (as it should be in a respectable memoir), that nest in which I once hatched from my mother’s mother and opened my little eyes to God’s light; Grandmother’s house stood at the upper end of Okladnikovaya Slobodka (the city of Mezen), along Pervomaiskaya Street, on the edge of a vast, endless swamp, passing beyond the Pyya River into the Malozemelskaya tundra. Jumping out of the window, with great effort, one could wander through the northern mossy palestines all the way to the Kara Sea, to the disastrous edge of the white world... "