At first I dreamed of competing with Dostoevsky. I hoped that I would reveal frantic and mysterious spiritual struggles to the world, and the world would freeze, amazed. But pretty soon I realized that we had already passed the point captured by Dostoevsky - passed in the sense that degeneration had carried us further. For us, the very concept of the soul has disappeared, or rather, it now appears in some chemically transformed and strangely distorted form. We know only the crystalline elements of a disintegrated and broken soul. Modern artists express this state, apparently, even more openly than writers: Picasso is a wonderful example in confirmation of what has been said. That is why the very idea of writing novels turned out to be impossible for me and equally impossible to join various literary movements in England, France, America, because they all led to a dead end. I admit with all honesty that I felt forced, observing the scattered, disintegrated elements of life - I’m talking about the life of the soul, not the life of culture - to connect them according to my own drawing, using my own disintegrated and crushed “I” with the same heartlessness , with the same recklessness with which I was ready to use all the rubbish of the surrounding world of phenomena.