Notes of a Misanthrope.
Masquerade of Non-ideal People

1. 1. Presentation for the Udmurt
   National Library (Izhevsk).

"... I should say that this book stands a little apart from my other writings.

Usually the writer within me naturally follows the scientist and philosopher; literature is one more battle ground to defend my ideas. This is very apparent in The Real Time Travellers, and less so in The Good Student Variukha. What about the new book, if there are hidden layers, with hidden meanings, their existence is discreet and quiet.

The Notes are founded upon real events of my life. It seems I’ve wished to transform the suffered pain into something positive, to make something useful of my tortures. Of course I tried to look beyond my personal experience and to see behind the mocking faces of my tormentors something more significant, I would say, a militant egoism cultivated in my contemporaries with so much diligence and so little thought.

The second part of my book is the cycle of poems Masquerade of Non-ideal People.

From where did I get such an idea: to create this gallery of conventionally positive personages? The fact is that sometimes I'm obliged to 'talk about life' with very different folk. They are people of my students’ age, of my age, or people much older than me. I explain to them how suffocating, how difficult is existence in a world where everybody is concerned with nothing more than the consumer's prosperity, nothing more than the well-being of themselves and of their children. At this moment some of my vis-à-vis begin to look at me with a kind of surprise and ask, 'And so what? Is it possible to dream about something else? All people behave so, don't they?' Maybe, I've decided to show that they don't, that there exist people capable of dreaming about other things".