If a person endlessly returns to some experience in his life, it means that it was very important, decisively important, but was never fully understood. So I again begin to chew the gum called “first love.” This theme of my life does not let me go, and yet I have addressed it so many times in my writings, and there is no need to even talk about thoughts. For the first time I wrote about my first love in the living wake of what seemed like a final breakup. It was something strange in genre: not a diary entry or a story - and I transform all my most powerful experiences into stories - not a fragment of a future story, but some kind of howl, a sob, strangely intertwined with reflection, but at the same time integral and complete in form : beginning – culmination – denouement. What a pity that this “document” of immediate feeling mysteriously disappeared along with other manuscripts not intended for publication. This was discovered after the death of my stepfather. He had a habit of hiding and even burying in the garden writings that contradicted censorship requirements. Apparently, this is how the injury of 1937 was played out. The writer was imprisoned due to an idiotic mistake in the case of industrial counter-revolution. The misunderstanding soon became clear, but they did not want to let him go in peace, because this was an admission of a mistake, and the unity of shield and sword does not make mistakes. After spending a year in an internal prison, he was charged with two diary criticisms of Fadeev and Erenburg and, without presenting an article, they considered a year of imprisonment as punishment for slandering outstanding Soviet writers. I suddenly realized that, unlike most of those repressed, my stepfather was never rehabilitated and went to his grave, burdened by his crime. Before that, he buried my story “Get Up and Go,” written in Stalin’s times, in the garden, and, of course, forgot the burial place. Luckily, the second copy of the story lay quietly in the middle drawer of my desk, patiently awaiting publication. I so wanted to include pages generated by a strong and immediate feeling in this story, but I could not find the missing ones.