I wrote “The Buridans” for twelve years. The idea of a family novel was suggested to me by my wife, writer Gohar Markosyan-Kasper, and she also translated it from Estonian into Russian. Having moved from Yerevan to Tallinn and meeting my family, she, of course, not immediately, but after a few years, said: “ You have such an interesting family, why don’t you want to write a novel about her?” By the way, she also came up with the surname for the characters, I couldn’t decide for a long time, and then one late evening, already in bed, I told her that it’s good, if the surname began with the syllable “bu” - after all, two famous family novels had already been written before me, one called “Buddenbrooks”, and the other “Bussardel” (“Bussardel Family”). And then it dawned on her: “Call them Buridans!” Of course, in some places I strayed even very far from the history of my own family, because this is, after all, a novel. I also added to the fictional characters a number of real historical figures who influenced the fate of Europe from the beginning of the twentieth century to the beginning of the 21st and even longer. Goar called these chapters “raisins in the cupcake,” and I wonder how the Russian reader will perceive them. In the original, the novel was eventually published in eight volumes. This happened involuntarily: having finished the next volume, I handed it over to the publishing house, and I myself began work on the next one. However, when the question of a Russian edition arose, Goar and I immediately decided that it should be carried out in “larger pieces”, collecting at least two Estonian volumes under one cover. And here in front of you is the first of these books - about a quarter of the entire epic. Alas, Gohar will no longer see her, she died the year before last. But how happy she would be!