Essay Writer

I was born in a not-so-friendly family. He studied mediocre at school. He was expelled from the university. He served three years in the camp guard. He wrote stories that he could not publish. He was forced to leave his homeland.

I thought for a long time how to formulate my nationality, and decided that I was a Russian by profession.

All my life I have been telling stories that I either heard somewhere, invented, or transformed.

I guarded a barge on the Neva, frozen into ice. She did not represent any value whatsoever; it seems that everything had already been stolen from her, which could have been stolen. But around the clock, three people the other two were with higher education were guarded.

They did not print me. I could not earn literary work. I became crazy, became very drinker. I was surrounded by the same drunken unrecognized geniuses. But wherever I bring my stories, I only heard compliments all my life. No one has ever expressed doubts about my right to engage in literary work.

I do not regret the poverty experienced. According to Hemingway, poverty is an indispensable school for the writer. Poverty makes a man vigilant. It is curious that Hemingway understood this as soon as he became rich.

I left to become a writer.

The only country on the globe where a person of incomprehensible origin, who knows the East European language, will feel naturally, is America.

When I lived in Leningrad, I read either “Tamizdat” or translated authors. And when in some American novel it was described how a hero went into a bar, threw half a dollar on a zinc rack and ordered a double martini, it seemed so real, genuine right Shakespeare!

Now in exile they like to talk about their suffering. Nobody threw me out, did not force out, did not expel. It’s just life itself. No one forced me to go there in handcuffs they simply advised me.

The traditional emigrant option at that time the wife works, and the husband, lying on the couch, rants in the manner of Lokhankin, makes plans and thinks about the fate of democracy. Which I did for several months.

In America, I never became a rich or prosperous person. My children are reluctant to speak Russian. I am reluctant to speak English.

I am a weak person, and a staunch dissident from me is unlikely to succeed.