Василий Ласовский
19+ SE

Preface to the English Edition

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without prior written permission of the author (permission may be obtained electronically from the author's emailing addresses below).

Any references to historical events, real people or real places are used for artistic or creative purposes only.

First printing edition 2018 (in Russian).

This is the English translation of my first book, it was prepared in the summer of 2026.

The First Edition in Russian was published electronically on the Litres digital platform and in print by Ridero in October 2018, ISBN 978-5-4493-5682-6, and the Second Edition in Russian was published in June–July 2026.

I do the translation by myself, since I know English and French to some extent, I studied them at school and university.

Initially, a machine translation source from Google was used, which was read twice and all found errors were corrected. The English translation of the book contains 431,834 characters (75,760 words).

Link to the book 19+ SE (Second Edition in Russian, 2026) in electronic form:

https://litres.com/book/vasiliy-lasovskiy/19-2-e-izdanie-74069359/

Link to the book 19+ (First Edition in Russian, 2018) in electronic form:

https://litres.com/book/vasiliy-lasovskiy/19-38626360/

Link to the author's page, where you can download the original Russian versions of my books and their translations:

vasilylasovsky.livejournal.com

Author's emails:

vasilylasovsky@yandex.ru

91tenet19@gmail.com

Best wishes to my occasional rare readers ;-),

Vasily Lasovsky.

Preface to the 2nd Edition

After translating my 2nd (The Last Da Vinci, 2024, in Russian in 2022) and 3rd (MNC, 2025) books into English, I returned to the very first book, 19+, which I wrote between July 2, 2017 and June 19, 2018, and published on October 15, 2018.

In December 2025, I began rereading and reformatting it for easier comprehension and correcting a multitude of spelling and syntax mistakes. I also began to wonder if there was any way to improve it. I decided to add some episodes from my childhood and youth, which I hope will be of interest to the reader.

I also seriously rewrote several small chapters, at the beginning of such chapters there will be a message about this.

Since these edits have become quite significant, it is best to consider this as a 2nd edition of the 19+ book.

The 2nd edition of the book in Russian has 422,218 characters (74,073 words). The 1st edition (2018) had 355,766 characters (62,415 words).

I plan to publish it in electronic form under the title "19+ (2nd edition)" in Russian on the Litres platform on June 19, 2026 (exactly 8 years after finishing work on the original version 19+) and in print by Ridero publishing house in the summer of 2026, ISBN 978-5-0070-7530-5. In addition, it will be presented as an electronic file on my LiveJournal page.

Also, a translation of the book "19+ (2nd edition)" titled "19+ SE", ISBN 978-5-0070-7528-2 into English is planned for the summer of 2026.

Terminology and restrictions

“Everything that really exists

exists within the present."

— Boris Pasternak.

The genre of this book... It's not mysticism, esotericism, or the occult. It's more of an everyday drama with elements of fantasy, or, as it's sometimes called, the "Path with the Spirit." Therefore, I warn you right away that the book will be completely uninteresting to most readers and incredibly boring for lovers of proper literature, although I occasionally try to entertain the reader.

This book is not published for a general audience. It may be of interest to professional astrologers due to its abundance of dates and numbers.

The book is based on real facts and events from my life.

My assumptions and fantasies (based on real facts)—I hope—will give the book the appearance of a work of fiction. In any case, I acknowledge the limitations and illusory nature of my own conclusions; they are presented primarily to tie together disparate facts, fill the book with emotions and make it easier to read.

The book contains numerous quotes; they form the core of the book. Of course, all quotes are enclosed in quotation marks. If a quote follows immediately after a reference to it, it is in normal font. If a quote is not preceded by a source citation, it is in italics.

The book is completely unscientific, and the writing style approximates the psychology of a 12-year-old boy. Or, if you find it easier to understand, imagine that this book is written by a poet.

Also, despite the existing chronology of events, taking into account the connections I hypothesize between them, I attempt to describe these events "as if in the present tense," occurring simultaneously, without regard for time. This book is more about a fictional puzzle or an abstract scheme than about the life story of a real person. In a puzzle, what's important is not the story of how the individual pieces are assembled, but the overall final picture. This is done in order to gain a closer understanding of the Spirit's creativity, which possibly occurs outside of time.

The order in which you read the book is also not important; you can start reading it from any place and in any order.

I would like to convey to the reader that, in my opinion, there are no small or large events, no good or bad ones, all of this is a subjective coloring that we give ourselves, which has little relation to reality.

By the term Spirit I mean "the Great Spirit, the Holy Spirit" (where my understanding of the nature of this phenomenon is very slight).

Of course, it's reprehensible that I use this imagery numerous times in the book, but without it, this work would not exist. The text may also refer to "the Spirit of Man," which implies "the immortal principle in man through their connection with the Holy Spirit." However, this book is in no way religious literature. I also apologize in advance to any readers whose religious sensibilities I may have unintentionally offended; this was by no means my intention.

This book in no way reflects my personal view of the events that took place. For me, as for the reader, the interpretation of the events described in this book is a work of fiction.

Because this work contains descriptions of real events, this book can have a serious and unpredictable impact on the reader, despite the author's almost complete lack of skill in writing it.

This book is not recommended for reading by persons under 19 years of age.

Prelude

Open sources on the Internet report this event in different ways:

"1973 — The discovery of an object resembling the head of the Sphinx on Mars, photographed by the American Viking spacecraft. Thirteen years later, Halley's Comet passed close to Earth."

"July 25, 1976 the American interplanetary probe Viking 1 transmitted photographs of the Martian surface to Earth. NASA specialists analyzed the images and, in an area approximately 3 km (1.86 mi) length and 1.5 km (0.93 mi) width, discovered something resembling a human face. For some reason, and as it later turned out, rather recklessly, six days later NASA decided to issue a press release announcing this quirk of nature."

(link in Russian)

https://www.kp.ru/daily/23935/70196/

"On July 25, 1976 the American spacecraft Viking 1 photographed Mars to help specialists select landing sites for future expeditions. Among the images captured was a picture of the Cydonia region, located on Acidalia Planitia with the same unevenness.

Legend has it that scientists, upon discovering the artifact, hid it under a veil of secrecy to avoid alarming the public about aliens. Only one brave renegade—a computer expert named Vincent Di Pietro—risked releasing the image three years later. <…>

It seems NASA itself started the Sphinx myth back in 1976. Then, a few years later, through the efforts of its own expert, Di Pietro—he worked for the agency under contract—it inflated the sensation, which had been weak on the first try. And now, from time to time, it drops ‘news.’ Everyone's happy. Moreover, scientists simply need to print out cards of the infamous ‘irregularity’—fans of the anomalous will find what they need there themselves."

Thus, we have two versions of events:

The first (official) version is that the photograph was found and published in late July 1976. The second version is that the photograph was obtained in 1973, but they decided to publish it in 1976.

But what really happened?

Mariner 9

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariner_9

"Mariner 9 was designed to continue the atmospheric studies begun by Mariner 6 and 7, and to map over 70% of the Martian surface from the lowest altitude (1,500 kilometers (930 mi)) and at the highest resolutions (from 1 kilometer to 100 meters (1,100 to 110 yards) per pixel) of any Mars mission up to that point. <…>

Main surface imaging did not get underway until mid-January 1972. <…>

After 349 days in orbit, Mariner 9 had transmitted 7,329 images, covering 85% of Mars's surface [with a resolution of 1 to 2 km (2% of the surface was photographed with a resolution of 100 to 300 metres)], whereas previous flyby missions had returned less than one thousand images covering only a small portion of the planetary surface. The images revealed river beds, craters, massive extinct volcanoes (such as Olympus Mons, the largest known volcano in the Solar System; Mariner 9 led directly to its reclassification from Nix Olympica), canyons (including the Valles Marineris, a system of canyons over about 4,020 kilometres (2,500 mi) long), evidence of wind erosion and deposition, weather fronts, fogs, and more. Mars's small moons, Phobos and Deimos, were also photographed.

The findings from the Mariner 9 mission underpinned the later Viking program.

The enormous Valles Marineris canyon system is named after Mariner 9 in honor of its achievements.

After depleting its supply of attitude control gas, the spacecraft was turned off on October 27, 1972."

The Russians also participated in the space race to Mars. But they were unlucky:

The Mars Mystery (Graham Hancock, John Grigsby, 1998)

https://grahamhancock.com/mars-mystery/

"As the Mars landers were consumed in the global dust storm below, Mariner 9 drifted silently in orbit, dormant, conserving its energy.

Meanwhile the Mars 2 and 3 orbiter modules, from which the unsuccessful landers had been deployed, snapped away at the Red Planet in a whir of irreversible, preprogrammed activity—and sent back to a devastated Russian team picture upon picture of dust clouds.

In December 1971, as the storm subsided, Mariner 9’s systems were switched back on. Unlike its Russian counterparts, its computer was programmable after launch, and thus its mission could be altered as it went along. Such flexibility meant that this orbiter, of all the craft that had been launched that May, was the only one to succeed in its mission.

Mariner 9 approached Mars to 1,370 kilometers and began mapping the southern hemisphere from 25 degrees to 65 degrees south. It continued with up to 25 degrees of the northern hemisphere. By the time that it ran out of fuel on 27 October 1972, it had captured 7,239 stunning images of Mars—with sufficient resolution to reveal surface features as small as a football field. <…>

Inspired by the revelations from Mariner 9 that Mars could once have been habitable, NASA dedicated the Viking missions to the ‘search for life on Mars.’ For the most part this search was carried out by means of high-resolution photographs of large areas of the planet’s surface, analysis of the structure and composition of the atmosphere, and chemical tests on soil samples gathered by the landers."

(link in Russian)

https://ru.echo.az/?p=66885

"In 1972, Mariner 9 discovered formations resembling a ‘field of quadrangular pyramids’ in the Elysium Planum region. In the south polar region, Mariner 9 captured geometrically regular structures resembling artificial structures. <…>

Another unusual photograph was taken in 1976 by Viking 1 in the northern hemisphere near Cydonia, where more ‘ruins’ resembling Egyptian pyramids are believed to be located.

However, the most intriguing of the Martian formations was discovered approximately 9 kilometers east of the Cydonia ‘pyramids.’ NASA released this photo, which shows a structure resembling a human face."

An important point: in my opinion, Spirit may be taking into account that decoding the images will take time, so the photography must take place in advance. Plus, this unexpected, seemingly random dust storm on Mars lasting six months (September 22, 1971 – January 10, 1972) fits perfectly with the theory that the spacecraft arrived too early and, with the help of the storm, Spirit delayed the start of photographing of the Red Planet. Furthermore, the storm could well have changed the appearance of Mars, allowing the desired pattern to emerge on the surface.

Interestingly, Mariner 9's mission was specifically to photograph and map the entire (!) surface of Mars in great detail. And I think it accomplished that task admirably. Of course, there was a possibility that the photography would either miss the desired area (after all, 85% of the planet's surface was photographed, meaning 15% of the planet's surface was unphotographed), or that no one would see the desired message after the images were deciphered.

While preparing for the second edition of the book in June 2026, I asked Google AI a question about the topic, and it initially wrote that if there had been a photograph of this region, the Face on Mars would have accounted for only 1-2 pixels, and therefore would have been considered as a digital noise (garbage). Then it reported that there are no official photos at all (after all, if they are not published, then they do not exist), and for some reason the spacecraft allegedly ‘missed’ this section of the surface of Mars.

Google AI reported that there was confusion back then, and the Pyramids of the Elysium region were confused with the pyramids of the Cydonia region. I compared the sizes of the Elysium pyramids and found that they matched the sizes of the Face on Mars, after which Google AI said that it was mistaken, and if the Elysium pyramids could have been photographed with an image area from 400 to 900 pixels, then the Face on Mars could have received from 400 to 600 pixels (if photographed with the second, narrow-angle camera of Mariner 9, which, according to official data, photographed only 2% of the territory of Mars).

I also learned that photographing the Cydonia region was the second major component of Viking 1's mission in 1976, after it had successfully launched its lander to Mars. And it was urgent, because Viking 2 was arriving in a week and they needed to see the landing site, which was supposed to be exactly in Cydonia.

Another quote from the book The Mars Mystery (Graham Hancock, John Grigsby, 1998)

https://grahamhancock.com/mars-mystery/

"Now attention shifted to finding a suitable site for Viking 2’s lander. This is how Carl Sagan tells the story:

‘The candidate landing latitude for Viking 2 was 44 degrees north. The prime site, a locale named Cydonia, was chosen because, according to some theoretical arguments, there was a significant chance of small quantities of liquid water there, at least at some time during the Martian year. Since the Viking biology experiments were strongly oriented toward organisms that are comfortable in liquid water, some scientists held that the chance of Viking finding life would be substantially improved in Cydonia.’

Sagan and his colleagues were about to come literally face to face with something that looked very much like a sign of life—but not the kind of sign, nor the kind of life, they had imagined. Indeed, what they found was so beyond their comprehension that it was immediately dubbed an illusion and was not allowed to influence the final choice of a landing site for Viking 2. <…>

The next development was a decision from NASA that Viking 2 would not, after all, land at Cydonia.

Apparently the site was now deemed ‘unsafe.’ According to Carl Sagan:

‘44 degrees north was completely inaccessible to radar site-certification; we had to accept a significant risk of failure with Viking 2 if it was committed to high northern latitudes…. To improve the Viking options, additional landing sites, geologically very different from Chryse and Cydonia, were selected in the radar certified region near 4 degrees south latitude.’

All this notwithstanding, it is an extraordinary fact that Viking 2 was finally set down at a latitude even higher than Cydonia. It landed—and was almost overturned by boulders—on the distinctly unpromising rock-strewn plain called Utopia, at 47.7 degrees north latitude, on 3 September 1976. Thus—for no obvious reason says James Hurtak—‘a multimillion-dollar effort may have overlooked "paydirt" and may have become a trivial event…. A poor selective factor had been used to choose an area of minor geological and biological significance. It was like choosing the Sahara Desert as a suitable landing site on our own planet.’

Why choose Utopia over Cydonia when NASA’s own criteria mark both sites as equally ‘unsafe,’ and when the former is bland and uninteresting while the latter has rumors of water and the mystery of the Face? The question is a nagging one, because even if we accept Gerry Soffen’s instant dismissal of the Face as a trick of light and shadow, Cydonia still looks like a far more interesting site than Utopia.

Frankly we find the decision to land at Utopia baffling. But we are even more perplexed by the abrupt way that Cydonia was dropped as the preferred site so soon after the discovery of the Face on frame 35A72. It could be a coincidence."

This link contains a photo of a Martian pyramid taken by Mariner 9. The Face on Mars photos would have been just as clear if they had been taken by the same spacecraft in 1972.

Three-Sided Pyramidal Formation in the Western Region of Candor (Chasma Haas GJ, Saunders WR, Miller JS and Dale MA)

https://www.tsijournals.com/articles/threesided-pyramidal-formation-in-the-western-region-of-candor-chasma-13507.html

"On May 30, 1971 the Mariner 9 spacecraft was launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and reached the planet Mars on November 14. After months of delays caused by annoying dust storms the spacecraft was eventually able to send back over 7,000 images of the Martian surface. One image taken of the Elysium area appeared to include a three-sided pyramidal formation (Figure 1) that caught the attention of world renowned astronomer Carl Sagan. Sagan, intrigued by the shape of the pyramidal structure, presented the image at the Royal Institution in London during his Christmas Lecture in 1977. He also featured the image in his 1980 book and television series Cosmos in which he made the following comment:

‘The largest Mars Pyramids have a base width of 3 km and a height of 1 km, so they are much larger than the Pyramids of Sumer, Egypt and Mexico. With the ancient eroded shape, they could be small hills, sandblasted for centuries, but they need to be viewed from nearby.’

Figure 1: Three-sided pyramidal formation. Elysium area of Mars. Mariner 9 image 4205-78, 1972, detail."

Based on the Mariner 9 photograph of the pyramid, I conclude that if Cydonia had been fully photographed in 1972 (and Google AI reported that it was only a general shot, and the section with the Face was somehow missed), then in addition to the pyramids, an oval patch of unevenness (elevation) would have been clearly visible, and perhaps even something resembling the Face's nose. That is, even if such a beautiful image of the Face hadn't produced a wow effect, as in the 1976 images, it's quite possible there would have been something of interest to scientists, which could have been provisionally named "the Sphinx" (since something unusual was discovered very close to the pyramids, 9 km away, and the only thing that could be close to the pyramids is the Sphinx, right?).

Considering that the "Myth of the Sphinx" was very profitable for NASA, it helped to get funding for subsequent flights to Mars, it is likely that they did see something in 1973, and then sent a new mission to film the phenomenon with higher clarity, and even land a lander there to study it.

So what was really there? I think it was nothing more than a play of light and shadow on the rocky outcrop. But that doesn't matter, since the underlying message was heard—people saw the Face of the Sphinx in the photograph and associated Nostradamus's prophecy (original or fake one) with this event.

Here, Viking 1 was moved back in time by 3 years:

Prophecies of Ancient Astrologers (chapter from the book "Globa’s School" by Pavel Globa, 1990, link in Russian)

http://astro.kh.ua/04/предсказания-древних/11/

"In 1973, the American spacecraft Viking photographed something resembling the head of a sphinx, 350 meters tall, on the surface of Mars. 1973 + 13 years = 1986. Indeed, Halley's Comet approached Earth in 1986. Two weeks after its closest approach, an accident occurred at Unit 4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. This was on April 26, 1986. The numerological code applied to Nostradamus's prophecies indicates that disasters due to nuclear waste are to be expected between 1986 and 1991."

Nostradamus’s Prophecies

[This chapter was revised in December 2025 in preparation for the 2nd edition of the book.]

Michel de Nostredame (in French), also known as Nostradamus (December 14, 1503 – July 2, 1566) was a French astrologer, physician, pharmacist, and alchemist, famous for his prophecies.

A free translation of Nostradamus's poetry and prose from Old French was made by Vyacheslav Zavallishin, a Russian emigrant who published the book "Nostradamus. Centuries" in 1974 in New York (or, more likely, it is a later forgery from the 1990s–2000s under the same translator). I'll note that the poems below were popular in the Russian segment of the Internet; in Europe, they may not even know that Nostradamus had such prophecies :).

An important point: these poems were indeed published in newspapers in the 1990s. I read them myself at the time. So, for me the existence of these poems is an objective reality (regardless of their authorship and the time of their writing). They simply existed in the cultural consciousness of the masses at a certain time.

And is the information currently available on the Internet an objective reality? Of course, it is, but with some caveats. I take into account that it can be easily corrected, and therefore, in my opinion, the advantage is given to a faded paper page in a real newspaper or magazine from the 1990s over a constantly edited page on the modern Internet if there is a discrepancy in the facts between them.

(links in Russian)

https://nostradamu.narod.ru/publ/3-1-0-47

https://nostradamu.narod.ru/publ/3-1-0-48

https://nostradamu.narod.ru/BD/Zaval.html

https://hiromant.com/threads/neobyknovennye-predskazanija-mishelja-nostradamusa.1450/

https://ria.ru/20060425/46899364.html

https://stihi.ru/2007/11/23/2803

"The face of the Sphinx will be revealed on the Red Planet,

That brought many troubles to the peoples,

In 13 years a comet will arrive,

And five new disasters take away people."

"The tail of a terrible comet will hit the Earth.

People losing hair, skin and eyes,

They rush in mad fear from the depths of Borysthenes."

"Many will be waiting for the coming of angels from heaven,

And it will not be angels who come, but black clouds."

"A comet will come to Earth,

Carrying the Star of Revelation on its tail,

And the Earth will burn with a terrible fire,

And the dark angel will strike the Vault of Holiness,

It’s as if hell will come out of the Fourth Gate!"

On December 21, 2025 at 3:24 pm I thought that it was very strange. If this prophecy is a ‘modern fabrication,’ specifically, thought up between 1990 and 2000, then why did its authors insist on 1973 as the year the Face on Mars appeared, when it was already officially confirmed that the Face was discovered on July 25, 1976? Couldn't they have written it more plausibly: "In 10 years a comet will arrive"?

Somehow, they ‘faked the prophecy’ unsuccessfully, since anyone can easily determine that the prophecy is false. The logical (and paradoxical) answer is that people in the 1990s believed that the Face on Mars was discovered in 1973, and that the prophecy was based on this.

(link in Russian)

https://naked-science.ru/article/astronomy/haip-the-face

"The story of the Face on Mars, located in the Cydonia region, is particularly revealing. Although the unfriendly, human-like visage turned out to be an optical illusion caused by the play of light and shadow, as well as the low resolution of the camera installed on board Viking 1, in 1984 the 'face' became a real sensation in both the United States and the USSR."

Revelation of Apostle John the Theologian (Apocalypse) 8:10-11 KJV (King James Version)

https://www.bible.com/bible/compare/REV.8.10-11

"10 And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters;

11 And the name of the star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter."

“The Star of Revelation, i.e. the star that is described in the book Revelation (Apocalypse) is called wormwood.

In Ukrainian, chornobil (Chernobyl) is the name of the plant wormwood (Artemisia absinthium), which grows in the vicinity of the city of Chernobyl.

Borysthenes is the ancient name of the Dnieper River.

Two weeks after Halley's Comet's closest approach to Earth, an explosion occurred in the fourth power unit of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant." — Internet.

Some believe that the Book of Revelation mentions Wormwood (Artemísia absínthium), and that Chernobyl got its name from Common wormwood (Artemísia vulgáris), which is considerably less bitter, but the prevailing opinion is that it is not the specific species of wormwood that is meant, but its symbolic meaning of bitterness.

Preface

Let's get acquainted: I am a tall, middle-aged, brown-haired man with a bear-like build, long curly hair and blue eyes.

I am not a professional writer, I have been working as an accountant for many years, and I manage the accounting of several small trading companies.

This book describes my personal life journey and that of my group, the "Path with the Spirit." It may be useful for those who are pondering and trying to understand what the "Path with the Spirit" is and whether they need it. I've described in detail all the advantages and disadvantages of this Path that I'm familiar with.

The time of the events is Moscow time (UTC+3).

This book is quite unusual, and you should be prepared for the changes it may bring to your life, perhaps even negative ones. A particularly dangerous chapter will be marked separately; it's advisable not to read it at all. Anyway, you've been warned. Let's get started!

Chapter 1. What Happened in the Beginning

24th lunar day (Pavel Globa "What the Moon is silent about," links in Russian)

http://volnium.ru/interpretation/moon_days?n=24

"Mystical influence: The forces are awakening. A very powerful day. Practice intense training and work. Time to utilize the transformation of male sexual potency. You can begin building your own temple.

The day is associated with the awakening of natural forces. It is believed that a person may receive a revelation or experience the awakening of tremendous power. If they don't know how to use it, they will pay for it. A family curse, as well as lycanthropy, is realized."

https://www.life-moon.pp.ru/moon-days/24/

"The symbol is a bear (god Shiva).

The ancient Egyptians broke ground on this day for the construction of a new pyramid. They knew that the energy of this day brings success to all undertakings. Today is a good day to begin building a house or lay the foundation for major projects. Study the information around you; it may prove important. You might even receive a revelation. In the past, people practiced communing with the elements and the forces of nature on this day."

(link unavailable)

"A jack of all trades. People born on the 24th lunar day typically possess a wide range of talents. It's important for them to identify their calling and field of work to channel the enormous energy potential within them. They must avoid stagnation and idleness—this will lead to lethargy, daydreaming, and an inadequate perception of reality. To develop harmoniously, a person born on the 24th lunar day should explore different areas, be active, and devote time to physical activity. Such people typically possess innate magical abilities, easily comprehend the mystical laws of the world, and are adept at channeling and transforming cosmic energy. They are able to attract people to themselves, share their gushing power, and serve as a source of motivation and inspiration for others."

Childhood

My name is Vasily Lasovsky, I was born on April 27, 1973 in a village on the banks of the Dnieper River, adjacent to the city of Rechitsa in the Gomel region of the Byelorussian SSR (now the Republic of Belarus), a former republic of a now defunct great country of the past called the USSR.

Most of my life was spent among women, which left a serious imprint on my worldview.

My father left the family early, when I was about 8 or 9 years old. My mother had a strong, determined personality, and my father apparently couldn't handle the intense pressure.

I don't remember my father very well; I only remember two moments of him, each lasting a few seconds. He never saw me again after he left the family.

As a child, I played exclusively with girls, and considering they constantly had ‘secrets’ from the boys, you can imagine what a daily circus it was. But I had a completely natural attraction to them, and I was simply happy if they included me in their group.

This continued until adolescence. After that, I had no one to make friends with. Boys were never interesting to me, and as girls grew up, they labeled me as ‘strange’ and studiously avoided me.

Interestingly, from birth until I was 13, I had one best friend—a girl the same age who initially lived in the next room to me in a shared two-room apartment that my mother's company allocated to two families (one room for each family). I remember meeting her while sitting ‘on the potty.’ When I was about 5, we were separated, but I continued to communicate with her daily and even fell in love with her when I reached adolescence. At that point, our relationship ended; apparently, I wasn't her type at all, and again, I behaved somewhat strangely.

Around the age of seven, I practically left home. I talked a school friend into it, and we quietly gathered some food, grabbed our backpacks, and left that evening. We reached the nearest tree line, and when it suddenly turned cold—it was late autumn—we felt very sad and lonely, thinking about how our mothers would suffer... and returned home. For the next few years, I kept the necessary things for the hike ready, but I never brought myself to leave home.

My early childhood (up to age 10) was characterized by nightmares in which I was falling into the abyss. It was very scary. And it happened often. I fell every night, many days in a row.

Incidentally, many children believed (and not without reason) that I had serious mental health issues, and this was one of the reasons why they avoided me. I was characterized by sudden mood swings and a short temper, which was fueled by the atmosphere in our family and my inability to control myself at an early age.

About childhood hobbies

[This one and the three following chapters were added in May 2026, in preparation for the 2nd edition of the book.]

I was a completely uncreative child. I couldn't draw pictures. So I drew the blueprints. My mother brought home from work a lot of orange and blue graph paper.

When I was 7 or 8 years old, I drew wings and swords on it. Since the paper was in rolls, I could draw the wings full-size. I needed the wings to fly, and I needed a sword because if I left home, I'd need something to fight my enemies with.

As I grew a little older and my body mass unexpectedly and significantly increased, I realized I wouldn't be able to make wings large enough to lift my body into the air. This was a major stress in my life.

The epoch of sections, clubs and other hobbies

For quite a long time, I was involved in the canoeing and kayaking section. I was about 10 or 11 years old at the time. The Dnieper River flowed through our town of Rechitsa, and at the spot where there was a small bridge leading to the town beach, there was a boat dock, and next to it, a building housing the canoeing and kayaking section.

We ran 3 km marches along the beach and further along the river, and in any weather and at any time of year we swam in our kayaks, and the older guys also swam in canoes.

These kayaks and canoes were not for tourists, but truly sporty, designed for high-speed movement on regular, flat water. Made of plywood, they were lightweight and hydrodynamically designed, allowing them to accelerate to high speeds with just a few paddle strokes.

It was also at this active age that I first discovered a ship modeling club, and then a couple of years later, right in our apartment house at 69 Naumova Street, at the end of the building farthest from my entrance, an aircraft modeling club opened.

What most attracted me to the ship models was the changing configuration of the frames (the transverse bulkheads running the entire length of the ship). They created the underwater configuration of the ship, and for the ship to achieve high speed, its hull had to have a perfect hydrodynamic configuration. The hulls of naval ships have a very beautiful and perfect shape.

Also, when modeling the ship, I had to separately fabricate and install various small elements onto the model that were very similar to the real things, but were actually very small. I suppose it's in my nature to sit at a desk for weeks and meticulously create miniature parts for a ship model.

As a result, I had at home a real floating model of a ship (torpedo boat) about 45 cm long, equipped with a rubber-band motor.

I also managed to buy about a dozen ready-made (all that was left was to assemble them) plastic model airplanes and one ship, and within a year the entire sideboard in our apartment was filled with these models.

In the aircraft modeling club, we didn't make exact replicas of real planes. The goal was different: to create a model that could fly as well as possible. We mainly made control line models, for training and separately for aerial combat.

The control line model was controlled by a special handle, to which two 16-meter-long metal cords were attached. The person controlling the aircraft stood in the center of the platform, while the assisting team members started the engine of the aircraft model and launched it into flight.

The model's internal combustion engine ran on ethyl alcohol, which provided a wealth of excitement, as everyone's hands were covered in oil, the propeller could give you a good whack on the fingers, and the engine sounded like a moped without a muffler, which was definitely a joy for all the boys. When running, the engine practically pulled the model forward, making it difficult to keep it on the launch pad. The models themselves were large, with a wing span of at least 90 cm, and the airplane model itself had stunning contours, was heavy, and was impressive.

As a child, I had a Nocturne-212-stereo turntable and vinyl records by Alla Pugacheva, The Beatles, Space ("Magic Fly," 1977), and Joe Dassin. Then we got a reel-to-reel tape recorder, and I managed to record songs from the radio; my favorites were Modern Talking and Europe ("Final Countdown").

Like all boys, I wanted my own camera and started taking photos. First, I got a "UFK-2 Photo-Constructor," and then a real camera, the Smena-8M! I even used it to shoot a couple of rolls of film and then managed to develop them. I had almost everything I needed for photography: chemical reagents, a wash tank, and even a photo flashlight with a red light to illuminate the printing of photographs, but I didn’t have a photographic enlarger, and as a result, I couldn’t transfer a single photograph from film to photographic paper.

About collecting

At the age of 7–8 years old, I was given (apparently by my mother) a small album of 3 pages already with postage stamps. Apparently, no one expected me to take up this hobby. Within a year, I first got a medium-sized album that could hold up to 400 stamps, and then I managed to buy three albums of the largest size and quality available in the USSR at the time. Each of these albums held up to 800 stamps, and within another 2 or 3 years, all my albums were completely filled. By 1986, my collection already had over 2,500 stamps and souvenir sheets, mostly USSR stamps from the 1960s onward, about 1,800 of them. This represented almost 40% of the stamps issued in the USSR since 1923. I also had a few stamps from the 1930s and a couple dozen military stamps from the 1940s.

My passion for philately has given me hundreds of different emotions (impressions). Many stamps each held their own unique emotions. Of course, each stamp carries its own artistic image. But I'm not interested in the imagery in most stamps. For me, the beginning, the starting point, is precisely my ingrained emotions toward a specific stamp. What's depicted on it is practically irrelevant and can only be explored to deepen the emotion and my experience. My emotions toward stamps are only partially related to what they depict.

It's also important that stamps are small, making them ideal for emotional enrichment. I also tried collecting postcards, but they're much larger than stamps, and seeing them doesn't produce the same effect.

When, many years later, I try to analyze this miracle, I noticed that I am interested in stamps from the 1960s to mid-1985; older stamps were poor and uninteresting emotionally; newer stamps were absolutely uninteresting, since the advent of the digital era was felt and, accordingly, the quality of design and artistic content dropped sharply.

Stamps from other countries (not the USSR) were practically uninteresting to me. Stamps from countries of the socialist bloc held little interest, and stamps from various banana states were especially interesting.

About books

I loved reading from an early age. I read every book and magazine I could get my hands on. My favorite authors were Alexandre Dumas (The Three Musketeers, Twenty Years After, The Vicomte de Bragelonne, Queen Margot, The Count of Monte Cristo), James Fenimore Cooper (The Deerslayer, The Last of the Mohicans, The Pathfinder), and Jules Verne (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, A Captain at Fifteen).

Around the age of 7, I had a musketeer costume, and a couple of years later I was going to make myself an native American costume.

Of course, I was also crazy about any science fiction I could get my hands on for a couple of days. This included, of course, the Strugatsky brothers, in my teens and youth I read many of their works.

I could read a book of 300–400 pages in one evening or night.

During the Soviet era, decent fiction was hard to find, and some books had to be read in the library reading room, where I often sat for days after classes.

I was extremely fond of pseudo-scientific literature with biographies of famous people. William Seabrook's "Doctor Wood, modern wizard of the laboratory" and Richard Feynman's "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" were two of my favorites.

I also had a collection of books on model-making, photography and fishing.

The First Bell

The first bell rang on June 19, 1985, the year I turned 12. I know the exact date from my mother's words, who reminded me of it at the end of May 2017.

12 years is an important age for a person; during this period, events can occur that will have a significant impact on their life.

Under our apartment, where my mother and I lived, at 97-A Sovetskaya Street, apartment No. 74, Rechitsa, in the basement of our multi-story building, a supposed ‘carbide container’ exploded. In fact, I can't say for sure whether it was just carbide or something else. The most plausible theory is that the carbide, upon contact with water, heated the oxygen cylinders, causing them to explode simultaneously. Another theory was that it was real explosives, as the basement belonged to a local hunter. The local prosecutor's office was investigating, and a KGB agent was dispatched from Moscow.

As a result, the thick, 20-centimeter-thick concrete floor slab in my room in our two-bedroom apartment on the first floor was broken into three pieces and completely collapsed. The edges of the broken slab remained level with the floor, but the center sank more than 2.5 meters. All the partitions in the basement were blown away, and the slab fell into a large hole.

The epicenter of the explosion was about 20–25 cm away from the spot in the center of the room where I so loved to lie on my stomach on the floor and draw or sketch on paper. Aside from my room, the rest of our two-room apartment was undamaged, and we lived there for several more months.

External consequences: the basement's outer door was smashed so hard that it flew off and hit the wall of a neighboring nine-story panel building, similar to ours, located 60 meters from ours. The door flew past some suddenly sober alcoholics sitting on a bench near the entrance (they say they stopped drinking after this incident), and right next to a sandbox where children were playing. The incident occurred around 6 pm.

The explosion was so powerful that cracks appeared in the walls of our high-rise apartment building, all the way up to the 9th floor (my mother recalls; I remember the cracks extending all the way to the 5–6th floor). Experts said that standing not only at the epicenter but anywhere else in our apartment would have been fatal due to the extreme dustiness of the blast.

When Mom arrived home, she didn't know where her child was and, seeing the uneaten lunch on the kitchen table, assumed I hadn't returned from the library yet. Rescuers hesitated to clear the rubble, fearing the entire building would collapse. Over the following months, they first installed logs, which at least somewhat supported the floors, then replaced them with a concrete block structure, strengthening the damaged building.

No one was injured in the explosion. I was in the library when it happened. I was supposed to be home by the time of the explosion and wait for my mother, with whom I was planning to go for a walk that evening. But I was late, not knowing what time it was—my digital wristwatch had stopped, its battery dead. My mother was delayed by a friend who persuaded her to go thrift store with her.

A few months later, the state allocated us a new apartment at 69 Naumova Street, Apt. 19. Interestingly, the building number contains a nine and a six, which is essentially a nine but upside down, and the apartment number is 19, the same as the day of the explosion. I learned that my mother was offered a choice of two apartments in buildings under construction, and she chose the one she considered the best. At the time of choosing the apartment, since the building had not yet been commissioned, the apartment had no number.

You might ask why I'm so picky about numbers and dates? I only recently became interested in coincidences; I only learned the exact date of this event in May 2017, when my mother told me about it. So, I got carried away and started remembering everything connected with these numbers.

At the time of writing this book (summer 2017), I lived in apartment number 109 in another city. When we bought this apartment, my mother also didn't know its number, as it was purchased during the construction of the building. So, it turns out I've lived most of my life in apartments numbered 19 and 109.

The next event happened the following year…

On April 26, 1986, a small distance by our country's standards, 110 km south of our city, an explosion occurred at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.

In my opinion, in some sense the physics of both explosions have common elements: a rupture of the floor slab or a rupture of the reactor vessel with the release of a large artificial cloud carrying death.

Of course, you will say that these two events are completely different in scale and in no way can they be compared, since one is large, bringing death and misfortune to thousands of people and animals, and the second is small and insignificant, as a result of which no one was actually harmed.

This is, of course, true, and I agree with it, but let us, while reading my book, leave behind the human, social perception when we pay attention exclusively to facts that have a global impact on the masses of people and do not notice facts that have an impact on one person.

And if we abstract ourselves from human emotions and imagine, for example, a ‘chessboard with pieces,’ we will understand that both events may well occupy one fixed cell on the playing field and each produce an impact of its own strength.

You may have noticed that the Chernobyl accident occurred on April 26th, and my birthday is on April 27th. That's a one-day difference, which is also quite interesting.

According to one version, the Face of the Sphinx on Mars was discovered in 1973, which is the year I was born.

The Chernobyl disaster had a profound impact on my life, becoming my springboard into adulthood. If it hadn't happened, this book probably wouldn't exist, and I'd be a completely different person, and the world around me would be completely different.

Consequences

Since the Chernobyl disaster sent clouds of toxic dust into the air, and we lived just north 110 km of the epicenter, our town became unsafe, so my mother immediately took me to the oil town where she worked at the time. Thus, I found myself in Siberia, not even in the taiga, but in the permafrost zone, in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, in the city of Noyabrsk.

This region is considered part of the Far North, and more than half of its territory lies above the Arctic Circle. But we lived in the very south of this beautiful place, and all we had was tundra, dotted with stunted trees, and a variety of experiences, including the polar night and the Northern Lights. Winter temperatures reached –55 degrees Celsius, while summer temperatures reached +45 degrees Celsius.

I was lucky that there was a school near our house, where I ended up in a special physics and mathematics class.

After finishing the 8th grade of secondary school, I was sent to study in Minsk, the capital of the Republic of Belarus (then it was the BSSR), where I managed to enter the Radiotechnical School (now the Radiotechnical College).

My future major was in computer software development. When I applied, I had a 4.5 grade, the minimum passing score, and I was at the very bottom of the applicant list, somewhere near the bottom. So, I barely made it, and I don't think I would have been able to get into this Technical School without a special class focusing on physics and mathematics.

And without the Chernobyl accident, I wouldn’t have had this special class in my life.

At Technical School, I did freestyle wrestling in my physical education class, and in after-school clubs, I did karate, kung fu, wushu, and qigong. It was incredibly popular back then. I also had a big Bruce Lee poster on my wall. It was a huge phenomenon back then; every boy took kung fu classes, and every house had a poster of Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, or… Sabrina.

I also had a red Diana Stereo audio player and about ten audio cassettes of rock and pop bands: Kino, Nautilus-Pompilius, Aria, Alisa, Metallica, Accept, A-ha, Depeche Mode and Modern Talking.

So, I was a very typical teenager of that era.

During my studies at the Technical School, I remember one event.

I was spending the night at a classmate's apartment one night, and I needed to go to the bathroom. It was dark, and I remember the walls in the apartment glowing strangely, and when I touched them, they even flexed a little.

That was a funny illusion. It's worth adding that this guy's mother was a very unusual person, and I'd say she was influenced by mystical forces.

Then the following events occurred: in the first and second years of Technical School, there were several national Olympiads, and I took second place in the Computer Science Olympiad two years in a row; and in my second year, I was lucky and also took first place in the Physics Olympiad.

It was quite easy to get 2nd place at these Olympiads, since it was given to several participants at the same time, but 1st place was given only to one person.

In my second year, they gave it to me, and it was a big surprise, because they awarded it not for the correct solution, but for originality. The teachers were surprised that, while solving an optics task, I developed my own theory of light reflection—incorrect but original—and solved the task based on it. So, it seemed like they gave me the prize for original thinking.

Then the Ministry of Education of the Byelorussian SSR and representatives of two educational institutions, the Minsk Radiotechnical School (MRT) and the Minsk Radiotechnical Institute (MRTI, now BSUIR), developed a certain Agreement according to which the winners of the Republican Olympiads were accepted without examinations (and, in fact, transferred after completing the second year of Technical School to the first year of the Institute) to a similar specialty.

This Program concerned the winners of the Republican Olympiads among Technical School students.

The Agreement was developed and approved the very year I won the Republican Physics Olympiad. According to the terms of this Agreement, I had to win the Olympiad in the year of my transfer and also complete my second or third year of Technical School.

I met these requirements, and the Technical School issued me a high school diploma. They weren't authorized to issue one, but without it, I wouldn't have been accepted into the Institute. They quickly and hastily filled out a form that looked very much like a diploma, with grades in subjects like astronomy and fine art, which I'd never taken, and sternly ordered me to bring it immediately to the Institute, where they immediately confiscated the fake diploma, and I never saw it again.

The Institute was a hundred meters from the Technical School, around the corner on Pietrusia Broŭki (Piatruś Broŭka) Street. I submitted my documents and played chess with the head of the admissions office. On August 4, 1990 I was enrolled as a student. That's how I got into the Institute. Of course, I never would have gotten in any other way, as I had no connections and was a rather weak and mediocre student. It all happened entirely by Chance.

Well, here's the ‘icing on the cake,’ or why this event seems suspicious to me, and one could even say that it's not just ears that are sticking out here, but perhaps horns and hooves as well.

The fact is that no one else has passed except me through this program (Agreement between educational institutions).

The following year, the Technical School was renamed to a College, and the names of all the specialties were changed. According to the Agreement, transfer to the Institute was only possible for a specialty with the same (identical) name. As a classmate of mine at the Technical School, who placed first in Computer Science Olympiad every year, noted, it seemed as if this program was adopted solely to promote a very specific person.

I didn’t want to write this because this fact has a very ambiguous interpretation, but it really happened, and I am forced to point this out, since this way the reader will have a more complete impression of how I was seen ‘from the outside’ by people who knew me for several years.

A slightly tipsy classmate of mine at University admitted that I was something of ‘an angel’ in my class. And I understand perfectly why.

Despite living in a dormitory, I never attended any social gatherings involving card games until the early hours, drinking, and socializing with women. I was completely deaf to any ‘tempting applications.’

But that doesn't mean my emotions were so pure and bright. Of course, even if I was an angel, I wasn’t such a light one.

I always had ‘a wall’ that separated me from other people, and I did not try to connect my emotions with other people's experiences.

And now about the event that changed my whole life.

Dormitory No. 1 at MRTI, where I lived (the building was built in November 1973), was located near 400 meters to the Oktyabr Cinema, one of the best in Minsk, and of course where film premieres were held. The cinema was also within walking distance from the Technical School dormitory, but the distance was about one km, so I usually passed by it on public transportation. When I entered the Institute (University), I would often stroll near the cinema in my free time.

At the beginning of my second year, sometime in October or November 1991, I attended the premiere of the film Mona Lisa by Belarusian director Nikolay Studnev. His wife and the singer in the film, Liliya Studneva, was also present.

Interestingly, the film's release year contains the numbers 19 and 91, which can be read as 19 backwards. I should also note that I don't remember the exact year I attended the film's premiere. I do remember the event itself and that it happened in mid- or late autumn. I learned from the Internet that it was 1991, as the year the film premiered. It's important to note that I make an effort to separate my subjective experiences from actual facts, and if I don't remember the exact date of an event, I must state that.

I couldn't find a single link to the film itself online, but here's a summary (link in Russian):

https://ru-kino-85-99.livejournal.com/12097.html

"I found several issues of the monthly magazine Novye Filmy (New Films) at work from the perestroika era. It was published by the USSR State Committee for Cinematography and the all-Union association Soyuzinformkino. It consists entirely of annotations for feature films and documentaries in the current repertoire. For example, in the October 1991 issue, alongside information on Mindadze's Armavir and Shakhnazarov's The Assassin of the Tsar, there's a story about a certain film called Mona Lisa (Belarusfilm, ‘Artel F’ video studio, 1991)—I suspect that, other than the reviewer, very few people have seen it.

Lately, many amateur films have appeared, made by groups of like-minded friends. In this case, it seems to have been like this: a group of friends got together, and one of them came up with a plot twist—summoning the souls of deceased, suffering poets by gathering them all at a feast (what if it weren't ‘Poem without a Hero’?). The idea was well-received, and actors Andrei Ankudinov, who played the roles of the hanged man and Pushkin, Evgeniy Tilicheev, who played several roles, Leonid Tikhomirov, who alternated between being a cameraman and a guard, and Irina Kaleda, who bears a striking resemblance to the Mona Lisa and portrays both her and the director's wife, began developing it, along with Nikolay Studnev (a young screenwriter and director).

So, this skit-like film tells the intricate story of some provincial (pardon me, maybe they only look that way) filmmakers attempting to make a convoluted film about the twists and turns of our long-suffering culture, where kitsch meets chamber ballet and vocals. First, the participants summon the souls of poetry martyrs (the film is dedicated to Marina Tsvetaeva—this August marks the 50th anniversary of her death, and next September, the 100th anniversary of her birth). To the sublime music of Bach, Haydn, Fischer, Vivaldi, Offenbach, Debussy, Saint-Saëns, Rossini, Kummer, Rocha, Corelli, Chopin, and Nicolaus Cracoviensis from 16th-century, a vision of a burning candle appears in a church; then, faces appear.

The ‘confusion’ begins, as Alice used to say: the faces and the characters who came down to earth have the same faces. The faces, appearing periodically and smiling sadly, slyly, or encouragingly, watch their doubles do what they please. And they do whatever they please, fortunately, they have a rich imagination. Before Madonna's soulful rendition of the ballad has even ended, before the beautiful Carmen and Don Juan have time to freeze, finishing their dance steps, a worker and a peasant are already beating the priest with all their might on the lawn beneath the gallows with a cheerful slogan. And then, having hanged the priest, the worker and the peasant, wearing red bows on their chests, suddenly stick their heads in the noose, and all three hang in a row. Meanwhile, Akhmatova, Pasternak, Blok, Voloshin, Tsvetaeva, and others, hands clasped behind their backs, stroll along the perimeter of the roped-off area, while the director of the film escorts them, mocking the prisoners, using their own poems, turning their pathos against the authors themselves (to Blok, for example, he will say: ‘You are right, a drunken monster!’), and discussing the pitiful fate of the Russian intelligentsia. Jokes pile up on jokes: someone is ‘shot’ with a water pistol, after being forced to dig his own grave; the director sneers in Gorky makeup; a saint plays Kaganovich; one of the hanged men grows Pushkin's sideburns and either sings Gumilev and French romances or concocts a joke between three. Blok, exasperated, declares he has no time for this idiotic film. Akhmatova gossips with Mona Lisa about the Madonna and the director, who finally declares that Russian culture is completely incomprehensible and decides to return to antiquity and the Renaissance. Nymphs and Bacchus appear on stage, and the film crew adopts a new slogan—‘Let's have some beautiful erotica!’—and stages ‘living pictures.’ A cooperative gallows for newlyweds, reflections on the tragic plight of the Belarusian people, a lambada to the lyrics of ‘The Sufferings of Saratov.’

In short, the authors are declaring the general end of the world and the end of the end of the world. Perhaps all this, roughly speaking, chaos is foreseen by the laws of the chosen author of the menippea genre, but cinema has its own laws, and it wouldn't hurt to remember this." — Natalia Miloserdova.

I remember the film's plot as somewhat different, but it wasn't the plot that interested me. I watched the film for the songs it contained, based on Marina Tsvetaeva's poetry.

As far as I remember, the next day I bought a movie ticket again and brought with me a huge bouquet of several dozen red roses. After that, I attended every showing of the film in several theaters (I saw it over 40 times) and followed N. Studnev himself, regularly ‘feeding’ bouquets of roses to his fair half, the singer and dancer in the film.

Here are two more links describing the film Mona Lisa (I found them in 2025, links in Russian):

https://gosfilmofond.ru/films/232387/

https://cyberleninka.ru/article/n/avtorskie-intentsii-i-postmodernistskie-tendentsii-v-filmah-nezavisimyh-belorusskih-studiy-nachala-90-h-godov-hh-veka

It was a precise blow from the Spirit, and at the film's premiere, I suddenly realized I was a Poet. What are the odds that a feature film about poetry will premiere near where you live, and that it will be accompanied by live performances by the actors playing the leading roles? It's important that the creators, charged with the film's message, were present; it was their direct contact with the audience, and the on-screen image reinforced that impact.

I believe the likelihood of this happening is very close to zero, as no one in the world makes films about poetry. These are the kind of major feature films that would attract thousands of ordinary spectators, young people seeking entertainment, and people unversed in poetry.

The film's origin story is unusual. Initially, the director received a small grant from a German foundation to produce an educational documentary for German television. However, with this meager budget, he managed to create a full-fledged feature film. As far as I remember, the film was completely unappreciated by audiences. But it couldn't have been otherwise—who needed a film about poetry when a vast country was falling apart around them?

Of course, the poems I wrote in the six months after that event were worthless. I wrote only a dozen poems, and fortunately, that's when I stopped dabbling in such nonsense. Here's the best of them (the first two lines are missing; I couldn't remember them, after all, more than 20 years had passed). I'll also note that ‘Word’ was capitalized:

"… I broke free,

I howl like the wind.

Again the thoughts fall into line—

Ah, to have time to finish this Word:

Never going back,

I will never sleep in peace!"

I suddenly realized that I was missing something in a world limited by computers and Donald Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming, and I rushed to make up for lost time.

Feeling like a Poet, I began writing poetry, never left the Minsk Central Library, went to every concert in a row at the church—the Chamber Hall of Philharmonia, and even began playing an extra in the folk theater, the best at that time in Minsk, fans know which one.

As a result, I started skipping classes and was expelled from the Institute at the end of the 3rd year.

Even though I stopped attending lectures, I continued to come regularly to collect my scholarship right up until my expulsion, and this shows that even in such an unusual situation I remained as pragmatic as possible.

Even after I was expelled, I continued to live in the dormitory for another six months, moving into one of the empty rooms, and brazenly lied to the guards at the entrance.

I haven't changed at all as a person, but all my hobbies have changed. My old interests are completely gone, as if programming, math, and physics were just a passing hobby, replaced by a new passion.

I had no emotional or psychological problems. There were essentially no unnecessary worries; I simply climbed the stairs to the next level of my life and began exploring it with interest.

A quote from the Internet on how important the collapse of the USSR in 1991 was for the entire world:

"Businessmen from Switzerland, Germany, Luxembourg, and other comfortably settled corners of our planet in 1992 are very fond of Russia, despite the utter chaos that reigns here. After all, it's here that you can party comfortably for a month on ten bucks. Here are cheap and high-quality prostitutes. This is Russia—a defeated country, abandoned to the stream and plunder, along with its entire population."

In late 1991, in addition to the collapse of the USSR, another very important event occurred. In December 1991, the Sofia Publishing House released its first books on esotericism. Until then, these were largely unknown samizdat publications. Only with the collapse of the USSR did such ‘trash’ books begin to be sold left and right.

To entertain the reader, I'll indulge in a little fantasy. Let's take the following sequence:

Chernobyl accident >> Collapse of the USSR >> Sofia Publishing House.

Of course, one can (and should) object here: how did a medium-sized event influence a major event that led to such a small event? But let's abstract away the size of the events and assume that for whoever or whatever is behind the chessboard, the size of the events doesn't matter; what matters is that the outcome is 100% achievable.

Based on this strange logic, one might surmise that the founding of the Sofia Publishing House, which began publishing esoteric literature, could well have been a link in this incomprehensible chain of events. Since this literature had never previously existed in the USSR (except through samizdat) and books were generally difficult to obtain, the people, hungry for any kind of literature, simply swept them off store shelves.

Of course, director Nikolay Studnev also bought all these books, and since I was his ’errand boy,’ an unofficial assistant director, I was the one buying them for him. And since I really liked the Studnev’s, I bought double copies of all the books and kept one copy for myself to read and thus become a little closer to them.

This is how I became acquainted with the work of Carlos Castaneda and read his 9 books.

What are the chances that I would have read and taken these books seriously without the fact that they symbolized for me a part of the world of the people I loved? I believe the likelihood of this happening is quite low, as I have never been (and still am not) interested in mysticism, esotericism, or any other systems of "human development." I considered and continue to consider everything related to them complete nonsense and a foolish waste of time.

Assistant director

In the early 1990s, the crumbling Soviet Union lacked funds for film production, so film director Nikolay Studnev earned extra money by organizing concerts for Russian performers.

In addition to organizing tours for ‘stars,’ he also organized regular theater skit shows where folk theater troupes from different parts of Minsk performed their parody scenes.

I was assigned as a freelance assistant director and did various jobs like shopping, loading and unloading, and I also followed him around and jotted down what needed to be done. It was, in a sense, like a secretary's job.

There were even times when I had to raise and lower the wings if the stagehand wasn't there. ‘Freelance’ meant I didn't receive a salary for my work. This suited me just fine, since my mother provided for me fully.

At the end of each concert, there was usually a banquet on the second floor of the "Na Rosstanyakh" ("At the Crossroads") café in central Minsk, where our headquarters were located. When the gentlemen artists had eaten their fill, they'd call us, the ‘servants,’ so to speak, and we'd get a little something from the master's table.

There weren't many concerts, and I spent days sitting in our headquarters. There was also a huge electric typewriter there, where, out of boredom, I would churn out my first stories and scripts. I was preparing to enter the directing department of some university.

Like a holiday, like a miracle, like a fairy tale!

[This chapter was added on May 30, 2026 in preparation for the 2nd edition of the book, when I discovered new material the day before on the personal VK page of Lera (Valeria) Studneva (daughter of Liliya Studneva).]

I was once again searching for Liliya Studneva's songs on the Internet, and I went to her daughter's VK page and found a post from July 30, 2025, which contained scans of pages 15–16 of the "On Screens" magazine for March 2000 with an article by Yulia Leshko.

There I learned about Liliya's real age at the time of our meeting and some details about their family life. Next comes a rather long quote (several pages long!), in quotation marks but in regular font.

(links in Russian)

https://vk.com/wall26834409_13941

https://vk.com/id26834409?w=wall26834409_13941

https://poiski.pro/vk/user/id26834409/wall

"’Will you marry me...’

Liliya was eight years old when she had a strange, mysterious dream. A young man appeared to her—dark-haired, wide-eyed, with bushy, arched eyebrows. He didn't resemble anyone she knew, not an artist, not a singer... Looking intently into her eyes, the handsome stranger said, ‘You will marry me.’ Liliya responded as an eight-year-old might: ‘I can't, I'm still little.’ The man smiled and said, ‘You will marry me when you're twenty-two.’ And he didn't explain anything else.

All girls love to dream. And Liliya was a dreamer as a child. She imagined herself becoming an artist, a singer, performing on stage, accepting flowers from admiring audiences…

The only thing she didn't dream about was her future husband. Perhaps because she knew exactly what he would be like. She just didn't know his name.

A failed acquaintance

Liliya's friend was getting married. The wedding was bright, noisy, and cheerful. Numerous guests rejoiced for the beautiful, frankly happy young couple and eagerly laughed at the witty, artistic toastmaster's jokes.

Liliya, too, was having a blast. But as soon as she saw who was ‘leading’ the celebration, her heart started pounding so hard she could barely hear him. Could it be? Could the prophetic dream really be destined to come true? Right now? And Liliya is only seventeen.

But a prophetic dream is prophetic for a reason: it must come true on time.

Liliya was introduced to a handsome toastmaster. It turned out his name was Nikolay. She remembered: Nikolay... But he didn't really notice her: a pretty girl, a recent schoolgirl, fragile, modest... If it weren't for Liliya's good upbringing and that very modesty, she probably would have decided to tell Nikolay that he was the One! After all, she felt this man would surely understand everything correctly. Liliya didn't look like an adventurer even then...

‘Like a bird, you say?..’

The next meeting was destined to happen only four years later. And it was completely accidental. Though, think about it, is there ever anything completely accidental in our lives?

Three young filmmakers—Nikolay Studnev, Vladimir Kolosov, and Yevgeni Markovsky—entered a small, then little-known theater under the direction of Vytautas Grigaliunas (now the Alternative Theater). Their reason for visiting this temple of art was rather prosaic: the theater boasted a wonderful little café. They wanted to sit in a cozy atmosphere and discuss their creative plans…

The conversation between the colleagues at that moment didn't touch on cinema, but they did discuss lofty matters: fate, the purpose of human, his essence... Nikolay, for example, claimed that he was, at his core, a bird. ‘If I want, I'll fly, if I want, I'll perch on your shoulder...’ As they passed the open door of the auditorium, through which the stage was visible, the friends paused. A slender, dark-haired girl stood on the stage, facing them. ‘Like a bird, you say?—Like a bird, I say,’ the actress said, looking Nikolay straight in the eyes.

It later turned out that they were rehearsing a play based on Robert Rozhdestvensky's poem ‘Ballad of Wings,’ that Lily's eyesight wasn't very good, and that she simply didn't see the man's face in the doorway. But Nikolay did.

‘Film people,’ as they're often called, are generally not the most timid. But something in Nikolay's heart tugged at that moment. ‘Let's meet this girl!’ one of his friends suggested. They set off to find the director. ‘We're looking for actors for a new film, and we'd like to meet your actors...’ The director promised to help. They agreed to meet at a café.

But two guys approached the filmmakers' table. ‘What about the girl?’ the young screen masters asked almost in unison...

The girl remained backstage. She arrived a little later. And when everyone had gotten acquainted and started talking, she quietly turned to Nikolay: ‘Please don't leave...’

This meeting, too, was not fateful. But the future was already preparing a rhyme for the phrase she uttered…

‘Do you have an extra ticket?’

In the mid-1980s, various local comedy festivals were very popular in Minsk. Particularly popular was the April Humorina festival, which featured a festival of ‘theater skit shows’ from the capital's theaters. Tickets for these ‘theater skit shows’ were, as they say, hard to come by. And our hero, Nikolay Studnev, was the chief director of all these super-popular comedy shows. He was even nicknamed ‘the minister of laughter.’

That spring, the Taganka Theatre came to Minsk. The theater's audience, naturally, was eager to see the capital's renowned touring performers. But it would have been a sin to miss the Humorina and, most importantly, the skits!

Lily's colleagues from the theater went off to see Moscow stars, and Grigaliunas asked her to go get invitation tickets to Humorina.

Having received tickets from Nikolay, she lingered in the auditorium, unable to tear herself away from the rehearsal. Nikolay noticed a girl sitting in the empty auditorium. She was laughing, quietly applauding, her eyes sparkling… It was as if he were seeing her for the first time. And for the first time, he clearly understood that he didn't want her to leave.

Quickly going down to the hall, he approached her and asked: ‘Please stay...’ Liliya smiled... and stayed.

Her gentle smile could be interpreted in any number of ways. But she was smiling because she had recently turned 21...

‘This is my girlfriend!’

Love is truly a mysterious thing! People destined for each other may walk different paths, see each other only occasionally or briefly, meet and talk about the most trivial things… What does it take for the miracle of recognition to happen? What ‘formula of love’ must be uttered for the pendulum of fate to swing in the right direction?

Everything is prosaic only at first glance—behind great Love there is always high Poetry...

While running errands through the city's Youth Center, Nikolay encountered an acquaintance. The acquaintance glanced at a slender girl retreating down the hallway: ‘Look, how beautiful...’ Nikolay was in a great mood that day and immediately seized the initiative. ‘That's my girlfriend!’ And within seconds, he had caught up with her. When she turned around, Nikolay saw familiar dark eyes and a familiar sweet smile.

They started seeing each other. So often that they realized: it’s better never to part.

‘As a sign of love and fidelity...’

Nikolay had no idea he was simply keeping his word, given in a cherished dream to eight-year-old Liliya. She was twenty-two when they married.

<…> Instead of rings, the newlyweds exchanged zodiac signs. <…>

It happened, ‘as predicted,’ in 1987, on July 18. <…>

Do they have weekdays? [Information as of 2000.]

Of course! Nikolay Studnev is the principal director of the Palace of the Republic, and he doesn't consider film directing a ‘closed subject’ either (remember his outrageously mischievous film Mona Lisa, with its songs and poems, pranks and parodies, which defies any genre definition?). He writes screenplays and is preparing a book for publication, which, even in its manuscript form, promises to be a sensation...

Liliya Studneva is a singer and actress. Her creative output includes the CD Persianochka [1997, reissued in 2006] featuring songs based on Marina Tsvetaeva's poems and the concert program ‘Other People's Songs.’ Bulat Okudzhava, upon hearing Liliya sing his Trubach, said he couldn't do it at that way, but God had commanded her... Her latest project, in which she collaborated with renowned performer Aleksey Shedko, is the musical and choreographic cycle Wings by composer Sergey Beltyukov. Many years later, Liliya returned to Rozhdestvensky's poetry: it was his poems that once prophesied her happiness." — author of the text Yulia Leshko, 2000.

The text insertion is finished. Now a few words from me.

When I met this married couple at the end of 1991 and then I communicated with them until the end of 1993—about 2 years with fairly frequent meetings, there were months when we practically did not see each other, but if there was some work to organize another fest or an artist’s concert, then we saw each other daily for 1–2 weeks.

I always thought Liliya was about 38 in 1993. I was 20 then, and I was sure she was 18 years older than me. She didn't look like a young woman of 28. Consequently, I treated her more like a mother than a slightly older woman. Her behavior was also deliberately energetic. Yes, she was shining with energy, but she did it the way women in their 40s do when they want to appear little girls—pretty artificially. In real life, I never saw in her the naturalness that young people possess.

Another interesting fact: the Internet indicates that she graduated from the Belarusian State University (BSU) in 1985, in the Faculty of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science (they teach programmers there).

Her husband was quite the playboy, he was liked by all the women around him without exception and he knew it.

However, this married couple was attractive to me, and I was, of course, enchanted by both of them. This is an endearing quality of creative people. You fall in love with artists because they represent something different from the average person. And this quality is more evident on stage than in real life.

On May 29, 2026 at 8:51 pm I accidentally stumbled upon this VK post from July 30, 2025 at 7:55 pm by Lera (Valeria) Studneva. I was surprised, then started thinking, then went to bed, slept for 20 minutes. I woke up, and suddenly it dawned on me:

I took Liliya's year of birth—1965—and added eight years to it ("Liliya was eight years old when she had a strange, mysterious dream.") —and got that her future husband appeared to her in 1973! That is, Fate intervened in her life and began to lead her down a certain path starting in 1973, the year I was born.

Here are two more links about Liliya:

The most unconventional singer: Liliya Studneva (April 18, 2006, link in Russian)

https://nestor.minsk.by/mg/news/2006/04/1810.html

My audience is the intelligentsia! (July 12, 2008, link in Russian)

https://www.sb.by/articles/moya-auditoriya-intelligentsiya.html

On May 30, 2026 at 5:35 pm I was surprised to find this:

Liliya Studneva (Zakharkina) (this is the first post from July 27, 2025, the next post from July 31, 2025 contains an article from the magazine "On Screens," which I previously found on her daughter's VK, link in Russian)

https://vk.com/id1061753101

"So, I'm online. No, not on social media. Although I'm on that too. A retrograde, a hardened conservative, a human who has spent twenty years hiding from civilization and progress on the small island of my family and my beloved work. For a while now, I've enjoyed being ‘behind the scenes.’ And everything would still be the same, if not for certain events.

The first is that I turned 60. It's an important milestone, and the time has come to think about my memoirs. Don't let my many, or not so many, detractors from the past flinch: this isn't about them. There are more important things. I want to talk about my Love Story and the fruits of that love and creativity.

About other events that prompted me to register on VKontakte—later.

I am Liliya Studneva. The daughter of teachers. A loving and beloved daughter, sister, wife, and mother. A dreamer and romantic, a singer and actress, the founder, director, and artistic director of the Liliya Studneva Song Theater. Almost twenty years ago, I ‘left the stage,’ as they say. But my creative children, born of love, remain with me and in my heart. They are beautiful.

That's what I want to talk about. One article at the time had the headline, ‘Liliya Studneva has reached the masses.’ I sang at a time when the Internet didn't exist. Let Nikolay Ivanovich and I have our beloved creative children who are ‘coming out to the masses.’"

An actor's life

Liliya Studneva sent me to be tutored by a friend of hers who ran a literary reading group. I and a few other enthusiasts would meet twice a week at the Minsk Railway Workers Culture Palace (7 Chkalava Street) in a small room furnished only with chairs and a piano, and we'd read the same thing to each other endlessly. I was, of course, unsuccessful, and they probably work with me because I was the only boy in the group.

I spent several months dabbling in this nonsense, with predictably zero results, until I accidentally stumbled upon a rehearsal at one of the most famous folk theaters in Minsk at the time (now located in this building (or nearby) on Moskovskaya Street— the "Variety Theater"). I was incredibly drawn to the theater's warm, creative atmosphere, and I began attending all the rehearsals, first as a spectator, and then I was given the opportunity to participate in the crowd scene.

It was a unique folk theater, led by a true professional theater director, a student of Anatoly Efros. Unfortunately, I don't remember the director's name. He was staging, or rather restoring, his own production of Alexander Volodin's play "Two Arrows."

We, the actors of the folk theater, worked like horses for hours every day, and almost no one had any role! All the leading roles went to just a few actors; the remaining 10–12 people in the troupe dreamed of only bit parts. Those who didn't get anything were, like me, extras in the crowd.

Over the two years I spent with this company, I grew from a nobody to a weak actor who might well be entrusted with a bit part in the future. It's the kind of role where you appear on stage a couple of times per performance and maybe even say a few words. I was incredibly proud of my progress, and I really enjoyed everything there. In fact, I did make progress, because to play even a small role on stage, you need to be an actor.

Who are actors and how are they different from ordinary people? And this is no joke: actors are very different from common people.

First, their psyches must be as flexible as plasticine; they must be able to instantly ‘adapt’ to their partner. We had numerous exercises where it was essential to hit the same emotional note with the partner, to reflect and complement their emotions. This is very difficult and, in fact, is the foundation of the acting profession, because even if you're a star and perform brilliantly solo, you need the support of the other actors onstage and backstage. When one part of the troupe performed onstage during rehearsal, the other part, sitting in the audience, provided emotional support to those onstage.

Second, actors tend to have a childlike, unmediated way of thinking. When they regularly ‘get into character,’ the part of their personality responsible for everyday life becomes dormant and doesn't develop.

It's typical for their souls to admire and rejoice wildly over the simplest things. This also happens because an artist's soul must be simple and uncomplicated, so they can more easily ‘take on the role.’ My soul, however, was overly complex, and this became my main problem on stage; as a result, almost nothing worked.

Third, it's the artist's openness by the soul, as an actor performs not only with their body but also with their soul, and their soul must be large and beautiful. If an actor is regularly on stage, his soul blossoms. The stage is a magical place; anyone who has been on stage even once, and has a tendency for this profession, will never forget it and will be drawn back in the future.

The nature of an actor is multifaceted, and in addition to the obvious skills of transformation (which is characteristic of a very small number of actors) and the brightness of talent (which is achieved through cultural education and the natural beauty of the Soul), a good memory and masterful control of one's body and voice, there are also little-known aspects of this profession.

The most important, little-known aspect is the ability to perform the same play over and over again, each time anew and differently. Even the extras in our troupe, sitting in the audience, tried to internally re-enact the action onstage. On the one hand, they thus emotionally supported the actors on stage, and on the other, they developed the necessary skill of experiencing the same event anew each time. In reality, this is extremely difficult and requires special psychological preparation.

Intention in Stanislavski’s System

Despite the fact that, in essence, we were an ordinary folk theatre, we seriously studied the "Stanislavski’s System" ("Stanislavsky method").

This system is fully described in K.S. Stanislavski's book "The Actor's Work on Himself," which was published in 1938 (it was developed earlier, between 1900 and 1910). Here's one modern interpretation:

(link unavailable)

"The Stanislavski’s System is a theory of stage acting developed by the famous Russian actor and director K.S. Stanislavski and designed to impart realism and psychological authenticity to dramatic performance. Researchers of the Stanislavski’s System believe that it provides actors not with rules, but with tools for behavior and communication. There are numerous working versions of the System, as well as borrowings of Stanislavsky's basic principles by other sciences and professional fields. Therefore, the concept of Stanislavski’s System, originally developed for theater professionals, is perceived as a metaphorical term denoting the foundations of the art of transformation, acting, manipulation, ‘reading’ and understanding people. <…>

Back in the 1930s, he taught that soul and body form a unity. <…>

Stanislavski advised investing one's energy in those aspects of behavior that can be controlled. These are primarily attention, purpose and action. Stanislavski advised actors to think about actions and goals. Emotions (feelings) will come naturally. When organizing an activity, the appropriate tools are important: attention, goal-setting (intention), and action. And the desired feeling (emotion) will emerge as a consequence.

Stanislavski's discoveries reveal what we can control (action, intention, attention) and what we cannot (feeling, emotion). As Stanislavski understood, our moment-to-moment choices of attention, intention, and action shape our lives. He understood this to be a law of nature, one that must be followed to achieve success and competence in one's chosen professional field. Stanislavski's goal was to create a method by which one can think, feel and act as the character would feel, think and act—and yet behave as naturally onstage as in real life."

Intention, or action in the broad sense, implying not only external action but also internal action, is a natural mechanism that a person can control, and a feeling that is essentially uncontrollable will obediently follow the intention, if, of course, a person has a special talent for ‘naturalness’—to be an ordinary person on stage.

And the cornerstone of his System is that embodiment is a consequence of intention, which, incidentally, was the opposite of Vsevolod Meyerhold's theory. And embodiment is what we see, feel, and even think.

Phenomenon

“In everything, I want to reach

For the very essence.

In work, in searching for the path,

In the heart's turmoil.

For the essence of days gone by,

For their causes,

For foundations, for roots,

For the core…"

— Boris Pasternak, 1956.

I reflected on the quality of my Soul, which allowed me to watch the same film dozens of times, listen to the same music, endlessly observe the play of sunlight and shadow on any object, or even on no object at all, simply observing the space. Without experiencing any discomfort and even making it with some interest. I would rather watch an old film again than discover a new one.

I'll note that I didn't see any additional illusory images at all. Seeing images are difficult, as I have a rigid, insensitive soul, completely uninclined to fantasies and with little imagination.

The phenomenon is that every time I watch a different movie or listening to different music. This may seem completely inexplicable, but it's true. I don't make any effort, I don't deliberately ‘look at it from a different angle,’ and I see a new film every time. And the film will be equally interesting in every part. It's a curious fact: I find all the episodes equally interesting, including the credits.

It sounds like I'm impressed by this piece of art, but I'm not.

For me, it's simply a way of exploring the world. I explore it on what I believe is a deeper level. Of course, I experience some emotional involvement. But it only adds a pleasant flavor to the process, not something that's important to me. And I try my best to mitigate it, as it interferes with the process of exploration.

But I also can't say that I study it with a ‘cool mind.’ Of course, I use my mind as much as possible, but that, too, is just a pleasant side pastime.

Most likely, I'm simply trying to understand, to obtain information directly, without limiting myself to feelings or reason. And this almost never succeeds, but I have this desire, and I consider it natural.

And importantly, during this process, I didn't experience that meditative state where one simply looks at anything, and their gaze directed ‘inward.’ No, my behavior was the most ordinary, trivial, watching a movie or listening to music, and I wasn't ‘immersed in myself’ and didn't change in any way internally.

When I started acting, this quality of perception really took off! It was incredibly exciting and captivating for me.

A group of us, students in the acting and directing program at a fee-paying University, spent hours looking at paintings in a museum, trying to decipher the artist's intentions. While the other students took this class with little enthusiasm, I thoroughly enjoyed it, as it was something I could express myself in and something I was good at.

I spent many days in the Hermitage and the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, looking at paintings and trying to sense the ‘fabric of the narrative.’

Of course, all this was superimposed on my childhood detachment, but the result was absolutely stunning, this property led me to the main natural function of my Soul [see in the "Achievements" chapter].

This phenomenon, incidentally, can help identify potential poets, as well as a host of shamans and mediums, among a crowd of children. If your child can spend hours performing the same repetitive action with interest, or looking at the same object over and over again, or watching the same movie dozens of times without looking away from the TV or computer screen, and, crucially, capturing every frame as if seeing it for the first time, then they fall into a kind of ‘risk group.’

When I listen to a song, I simultaneously know what the next line will be, and yet it's completely new to me. It's a superficial perception where I'm not touched by the world and it doesn't stick with me, and as a result, the world is always new to me.

This property has a funny peculiarity: when I see a person for the first time, he does not remain in my memory, and if he immediately goes out the door and a second later comes back in, I will be absolutely sure that I see a new person, unfamiliar to me.

Why do I get stuck on something as pointless as watching the same movie over and over again?

This action can be considered a peculiar form of ritual. According to the works of Carlos Castaneda, it is one of the exercises for working with the Spirit; this is how they summon it. Castaneda's followers call this process "non-doing," that is, a repetitive action devoid of meaning in everyday life. They alternate it with moments of "inner silence" for their minds. This quality was natural for me, but thanks to my acting work, I developed it significantly more.

This phenomenon is time-bound. The period when I find it incredibly interesting to view a work of art dozens of times, when I see and hear the tiniest halftones, ends after a certain period of time (it could be a few days or months), and I become completely indifferent to the work; and most importantly, I stop seeing and hearing any halftones in it.

The subjective time of perceiving a work of art also flows differently. When I'm interested, it ‘slows down,’ and when I'm no longer interested, it ‘jumps by like an express train.’ Meanwhile, real objective time behaves in the opposite way—when subjective time flows slowly, objective time often flows very quickly, and vice versa. Apparently, this is related to where my attention is located—that time will flow slowly (as if my attention is slowing it down).

It's also like eating candy: I discover an interesting kind of candy and gorge myself on it. And I don't know if I'll ever be interested in that kind of candy again. For this reason, I always try to finish my tasks here and now, because I don't know if I'll be able to return to them later.

Should I become a director?

I was 20-old, but already too old to study acting. Usually, those who enroll in Theater School at such a late age for actors are already considering a career as a director, which is quite ironic, as these are completely different professions, often requiring opposing skills and talents. Of course, I didn't stand out from the crowd and also considered becoming a director...

The ‘actor factories’ focus on ‘young human raw material’ is explained by the fact that they require a flexible body and a youthful, unburdened soul, into which the director leading the course would infuse their understanding of the world. And, of course, each director recruited only those people who were a personal fit. In this regard, it was curious to observe how the stream of sufferers eager to enter the institute moved from one educational institution to another in an attempt to find their master.

I spent my first year studying acting and directing at a fee-paying educational institution in St. Petersburg, and then I even ‘almost got into’ the free program at LGITMiK (Leningrad State Institute of Theatre, Music, and Cinema). Admittedly, I was applying for the puppet theater acting program. Of course, I applied for the regular acting program, but they told me they'd only accept me for the puppetry program. Perhaps because of my tall stature, strong build (some puppets are quite heavy), and interesting voice. I declined, and later regretted my decision.

In an acting career, the major you study isn't so important; it's more important to demonstrate talent and hard work, and perhaps you could transfer to another acting or directing program later. But I didn't feel I had any significant talent, so I didn't choose that path.

It's curious that, over the course of a couple of months, while sitting in the Theatre Library, I half-copied a two-volume work on the history of world cinema by a French author into a notebook. Such an act is completely impossible for a modern person, but for a future director, it's quite common. When a person writes by hand, they develop their mind.

Over the course of several years, I have watched many films by classic world film directors from Italy, France, the USA and the USSR, such as Federico Fellini, Luchino Visconti, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Andrei Tarkovsky.

[The description of the film "Fanny and Alexander" was added in December 2025 in preparation for the 2nd edition of the book.]

I was most impressed by the work of Ingmar Bergman. I have seen almost all of his films. My acquaintance with him began with his first color film, Fanny and Alexander (F&A, 1982, running time: 3 hours 8 minutes). I went to see this film at least five times over the course of two weeks, which is quite an achievement. I saw F&A sometime between 1989 and 1990. Most likely, it was November 1989 (I was 16 years old), based on:

List of foreign films released in the USSR from 1955 to 1991 (link in Russian)

https://svae.by/showthread.php?t=16053

"127. Fanny and Alexander / Fanny och Alexander (1982), (Sweden-France-Germany), November 1989 (Mosfilm, voiced)."

So, I probably saw it two years before I saw Nikolay Studnev's film Mona Lisa. Ingmar Bergman had a serious influence on my worldview.

"The main themes of Ingmar Bergman's work are the crisis of religion, the crisis of the traditional family, and the crisis of identity; the search for true relationships between people. Relying primarily on close-ups of faces conveying a complex range of emotions, Bergman, through his actors, expresses the complex experiences of a person's existential encounter with the truth about the world within and around them." — Wiki.

On December 19, 2025 at 3:57 pm I found the final episode in the description of the film F&A (link in Russian):

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Фанни_и_Александр

"Meanwhile, Alexander wanders the dark corners of Isac's house, filled with various mysterious objects and various puppets (Isaac's nephew, Aron Retzinsky is a puppet maker). He talks with Aron, who suggests visiting his brother, Ismael, whom the family is keeping locked in a secret room because he suffers from some kind of mental illness and could be dangerous to others. When they enter Ismael's room, the latter asks his brother to leave him and Alexander alone. Alone with him, Ismael says he can read Alexander's thoughts, filled with hatred and a desire for the death of one person, while describing the bishop's appearance. Ismael embraces the boy and recounts what is happening at that moment in the bishop's house: his sick aunt, lying in bed, knocks over a nearby kerosene lamp, her shirt catching fire, and she rushes around the house, engulfed in flames. It seems Ismael caused this event with a thought—his own or Alexander's—invoking certain demons that possess Alexander."

I was also impressed by an episode from the life of Ingmar Bergman, when, while preparing to shoot his next film, he spent a lot of time in a church, observing the play of light and shadow.

As always, when I took on any project, I expected to at least become a professional with worldwide renown. However, after a couple of years, I completely abandoned this passion, which also turned out to be temporary. Why? I finally realized that I possessed very little talent in any field of art and didn't want to waste years of my life trying to achieve a laughable result. The 1990s also played a role, when unemployed directors flocked to buffets, where they mostly ate, and were all ragamuffins, dreaming of ‘getting a few bucks’ to fund the production of their dreams.

Poetic films

A selection of Russian poetic films for fans:

An Ordinary Miracle (melodrama, parable, fairy tale, directed by Mark Zakharov, 1978);

31 June (musical, fantasy, directed by Leonid Kvinikhidze, 1978);

Take Care of Women (musical comedy, directed by Viktor Makarov, 1981);

Tales of the Old Wizard (musical fantasy comedy, directed by Natalia Zbandut, 1984);

Mona Lisa (light poetic comedy, directed by Nikolay Studnev, 1991).

Note that all of these films are primarily comedy, and while for a poet this may be a significant event in their life, for the uninitiated viewer it's just a light, incomprehensible comedy, and in most cases, the viewer simply won't understand any of these films. But due to a certain additional poetic quality, these films have their own value.

Back to the beginning

In mid-May 1996, I returned to my hometown of Rechitsa, to our apartment No. 19 at 69 Naumova Street. Soon after, on June 8–9, 1996, I woke up ‘talking’ to someone in the room. I don't remember what I said, and when I woke up, I only remembered the last phrase addressed to me: "To do this, you have to be a warrior."

Now I understand that this dialogue was conducted (on my behalf) by my Spirit, who was likely communicating with an Ally. The Spirit allowed me to hear the end of the conversation, knowing that I would follow the Path it had shown me.

Chapter 2. First Steps

The question arises: why did I choose the Warrior's Path then? I couldn't have done otherwise. It was a challenge, and I accepted it. I had nothing holding me back in the everyday life; I was young and had no particular interests, I had no active relationships with women, and I never had any friends.

I was quite prepared for such a turn in my life.

How did my life change? You could say it like this: "I started working on myself, eliminating my shortcomings and developing the opportunities that opened up." But that would be a lie. Rather, I was trying to survive in the changed world that opened up to me, and simultaneously trying to understand what I really was.

Did I have a choice then? I don't think so, as this was my typical behavior. I behaved exactly as I had in other episodes of my life, and in this sense, my personality hasn't changed at all. Incidentally, that's precisely why I never doubted my choice and, of course, I don't regret anything.

During the first months of this journey, at the end of the summer of 1996, I went to St. Petersburg and picked up my things that remained there. Curiously, there I accidentally met two young girls, both about 17 years old, and they told me a strange story: that a young man they knew was a ‘powerful black magician’ because he constantly ‘enchanted’ the most beautiful girls and ‘had fun with them.’ His father, when he once entered his room, saw him ‘hovering in the air’ above his bed. But this magician will not get them (these two girls), because they would fight for their freedom. I had never met anyone with any connection to magic before.

I went to the village where my grandfather lived and slept in one of our houses for a few nights. Every night, the Allies gathered around me and active did somewhat.

I believe the Spirit's task was to convince me that I was, as it were, a ‘continuer of the traditions,’ as written in Castaneda's books. At the very beginning of my journey, I had interacted with rather large entities that resembled humans, and I even believed them to be human. Of course, I pressed them for answers, and somewhat reluctantly, they confirmed that they were "the magician's party, sent to take me for training." Naturally, I didn't believe them and demanded a personal meeting. They arranged a meeting for me in Kiev; like a fool, I immediately went there. At the train station, I was met by a poor minor Ally, and at that moment I realized I had been cruelly deceived. And that there was no such thing as a ‘magician's party.’

But about two weeks had already passed, and I'd seen too much. By then, I could already stop my heart and see the world around me tremble. And I have already seen a lot of other things.

What did the Allies do? They poured a terrifying amount of a peculiar substance onto my energy body, smelling like ‘burnt wheat.’ My internal energy ignited, and perhaps as a result of this exposure, the outer shell of my energy ‘cracked,’ and the excited emanations began to explore the suddenly revealed world around them.

This event fits perfectly with the line from Nostradamus’s prophecy (original or fake one):

"And the dark angel will strike the Vault of Holiness."

Since the Allies are precisely the ‘dark angels,’ and the Soul is, naturally, the ‘repository of holiness.’

I had no particular reaction to this event; I simply observed the emanations being sent out through the breaches in my energy body. There was no regret or panic, as if I knew this was how it was meant to be, it wasn't scary, I just had to get through it.

Many years later I saw similar emanations excited by the opening of ‘freedom;’ it was a man who had died several hours ago.

Several years later, the Allies explained their behavior to me by saying that they had "a prophecy that I was supposed to die," and their behavior was in line with their ‘standard,’ which is what they usually do if there is an opportunity to profit.

Communication with the Allies is described in the corresponding (dangerous!) chapter.

Early on in my journey, I was convinced that my main work would begin after I turned 40, and for now, I was a sort of intern and could do whatever I wanted. However, when I asked myself what I wanted to do, I wasn't interested in either developing in the everyday world or practicing magic. I was only interested in ‘walking my path.’

Next comes a short period of influence on people and a long period of dreams.

Impact on people

I accidentally noticed that I could influence the people around me. One day, I was standing in line for fruit, and my gaze lingered on the saleswoman. I noticed that under my gaze, she began to move more slowly and, to some extent, ‘aligned’ with my gaze. Women were especially susceptible to external influence, which is probably why they were so easily ‘corrupted.’

A typical example of influence: I was travelling by train in a open‑plan sleeping carriage, on the upper berth, and opposite me, on the second side berth, there was a girl. Two guys on the lower berth were drinking alcohol and trying to ‘show interest in her.’ She rejected their advances and settled into her upper berth, preparing to sleep. Without closing my eyes, I entered my illusory ‘subtle’ plane, ‘climbed’ onto her berth, and ‘stuck my hand in her vagina.’ Of course, in reality, I wasn't actually climbing anywhere, and all this happened, as they call it in this century, contactlessly and ‘energetically.’ A few seconds after the influence, the girl had already descended to the half-drunk guys and started flirting with them. A couple of hours later, I had to send them all back to their berths, as they were keeping me awake.

In order to cause minimal harm to a person, I always influenced a new one, almost never influenced a person again, did not set specific goals, and influenced only the emotions of the Soul.

I quickly realized that emotional influence on the Soul is completely meaningless without influencing the Mind and Will, and I wouldn't influence them on moral principles, as for me, freedom of will and choice are the most important imperative of human behavior. In modern people, the Soul plays an insignificant role; it's practically atrophied; a single impact on it quickly wears off, hopefully without consequences.

After two years, I stopped these interventions (research), because I realized the complete senselessness of this behavior, and I did not want to waste my time and energy any longer.

This period can be called "my seduction by magic," and since I no longer engaged in such nonsense, it can be considered that the magic didn't hurt me too much.

Dreams

My dreaming period lasted over 15 years. It was a joyful time, but I won't describe it, as these are 100% my personal, subjective impressions. I imagine there are dozens of authors who would be happy to share their illusions with you.

I would suggest that dreams are common to all people, especially those who are not fully realized in the everyday world and therefore have excess energy. The scientific notion that "the human psyche creates imaginary images" is, of course, very close to the truth. Everything we see in dreams is created by our subconscious and exists only during sleep.

I followed the advice in the books and destroyed all the objects I saw in my dreams. There were many dreams where I'd already destroyed all the objects, and a huge wave would wash over me. Then I'd swim through it, and sometimes I'd manage to emerge, absorbing my dream and finding myself outside it, in my room, next to my bed.

Years have passed, the negative influence of the Allies has taken its toll, and as a result, I now hardly dream. Perhaps in the future I will be able to somehow rectify this situation.

Trips

Between 1996 and 1998, I traveled several thousand kilometers across the former USSR. I didn't know why. Perhaps I was trying to understand something about myself.

A typical incident occurred during my first trip to Sochi in the late autumn of 1996. Late in the evening, I was sleeping on the slope of a hill, then got up and walked toward the nearest highway, and I had the thought that I needed to take something from this world. When I later analyzed this incident, I realized that I had woken up part of the way, and that at first 50 meters I had been dreamwalking, and the world around me was slightly different from normal.

"Framing me"

The bad situation in which the Spirit put me, or in essence "framing me," occurred at the end of 1999 – beginning of 2000.

At the end of September 1999, I met a woman smoking in the train vestibule. We introduced ourselves; her name was Anna. I somehow liked her, even though I don't like smokers. We got to talking, and she unexpectedly told me that when she looked in the mirror, she sometimes had suicidal thoughts. She was also an actress, and I had some acting experience, and I singled out actresses among people. For some reason, I decided to help her. She was divorced, 10 years older than me, and had a child.

We lived in her apartment for several months, had a romantic relationship, and on November 3, 1999 we were officially married. Then, just a few months later, in March 2000, she voluntarily committed herself to a mental health facility. I tried to talk her out of it, but she was a very independent, strong-willed person, and I couldn't influence her decision. She considered me a boy and completely disregarded my opinion.

She spent a couple of months there, returned home, and I left her alone for a few hours, where she ingested household chemicals. She lived for a few more days, was conscious in the hospital, and, of course, testified that she left of her own free will.

When she was dying in agony, she asked me not to forget her (remember her).

This situation was a serious shock for me and made me realize that even close and long-term involvement in the fate of another person cannot save him and that, in essence, I have no talent for saving people.

Many years later, I remembered Marina Tsvetaeva’s poem Don Juan (1917), it was one of the verses that appeared in Nikolay Studnev’s film Mona Lisa, which changed my entire life, and which I subsequently often recalled during my student years:

(link in Russian)

https://www.culture.ru/poems/35935/don-zhuan

"And Don Juan had a sword,

And Don Juan had Donna Anna.

That's all people told me

About the beautiful, about the unfortunate Don Juan.

But today I was smart:

Exactly at midnight I went out onto the road,

Someone was walking in step with me,

Calling names.

And a strange staff gleamed white in the fog...

—Don Juan didn’t have a Donna Anna!"

Carlos Castaneda’s first book is called, "The teachings of Don Juan, a Yaqui way of knowledge."

What's important to me isn't the name itself, I understand perfectly well that it's the most common (like the name John in England), but that the poem connects three objects: Don Juan, Donna Anna, and... What was the third object?

As a child, I had one thing that, believe me, practically no other boy in our town had, and of which I was incredibly proud. Surely you've already guessed? No, it wasn't a sword (epee), just a sport rapier. A rapier differs from a 16th-century epee in that it doesn't cut and thrust like a Don Juan era sword or sabre, but rather thrusts. It was a real metal rapier for adults. For some reason, they sold it to me at a sporting goods store. I still remember dragging it home down the street at age eight. Can you imagine a little boy without an adult's supervision being sold a rapier that was almost as tall as him (it reached from the floor to my chin)?

… So now I am walking in step with you and calling names.

Over the course of several years (from 1996 to 2002), almost all of my close relatives died, leaving only my mother. The reasons varied: accidents, poor health. My mother turned out to be the strongest, and perhaps that's why Fate spared her.

Of course, I never had any friends, and almost all my relatives are gone. However, Allies appeared…

Allies

This is a dangerous chapter. If you don't know who the Allies are, don't read it under any circumstances! This chapter is dedicated to the memory of all their victims. If you do read it, and they eat your Soul (and they can!), then claims against me will not be accepted.

<<< !!! The beginning of a DANGEROUS chapter !!! >>>

I'll start from the end. The best way to communicate with the Allies is to ignore them completely. And in fact, this is the most important useful experience that I have learned by communicating with them around the clock for more than twenty years.

Allies have all the information that is or was previously in your head. It is they who come to you at a spiritualistic session or during any act of black magic, it is they who take the form you need—for example, your deceased relative, and say those phrases that sit deep in your memory and are identical to this person. They're essentially fooling you, but they're doing it damn well!

Allies rely on the information a person possesses, and if a person has information about their behavior, it can only make things worse for him (for her), as they will take this into account in their actions. This is reminiscent of viruses that mutate and are no longer affected by previously administered drugs.

In other words, if someone comes across them by chance and knows nothing about them, he will be at an advantage compared to a person who knows a lot about them but does not know how to work with them.

Well, have you changed your mind about reading further yet?

In general, the Allies are creatures that ‘possibly exist.’ In terms of intelligence, they are mostly similar to undeveloped animals, but there are also intellectuals and even ‘artists,’ just as domestic dogs can also be quite intelligent.

Their appearance depends on your preferences. The weakest will take on a form that you're supposed to like or fear, while the stronger ones have already formed a certain three-dimensional energetic form and will approach you in the form of strange spiders, wasps, cats, and other animals. Human Allies will be discussed later.

What do the Allies do? They draw away a portion of your Soul, draining your vital energy, then filling the vacated space with their emanations and, at the right moment, projecting their thoughts onto it. And since they've already thoroughly studied all your habits and memories, having spent years preparing, you won't even notice when a foreign thought is inserted into your thought pattern.

In this way, they attempt to manipulate their victims, leaving the unfortunate subject with two options: either follow these thoughts and become their pet, or fight the thoughts they inspire. But in this case, the person struggles with himself, as these thoughts are supposedly being generated by a part of his Soul!

It's extremely dangerous to reject even a piece of your Soul. Deprived of integrity, it begins to rapidly disintegrate. In psychiatry, this process is called schizophrenic disorder. The Allies, however, by bringing the victim's discarded piece of Soul even closer to themselves, will feel like winners.

In my case, I always felt the moment when, due to my oversight or poor health, the Allies began to pull away part of the Soul, fill it with their emanations (I simply call them ‘garbage’), and I was already preparing for the fight.

I'm lucky that my Soul has a large mass and that I've essentially spent my entire life doing what interests to me. Of course, I simply ignore unwanted thoughts that have an external source. This is easy to sense, because when an ordinary thought arises, there are no energetic vibrations at a distance from my Soul. If they are present, it means there's a minor Ally there, wasting their precious energy on this foolish undertaking.

And, of course, it's important that I'm the kind of person whose mind is very simple and unpretentious, whose thoughts are straightforward and uncomplicated, and so few in number that I consider myself stupid and narrow-minded. Thoughts and feelings play an extremely insignificant role in my life. As I wrote earlier, for me, it's not my thoughts that determine my actions, but my subconscious instincts.

There's a misconception that if you compress an Ally, they'll lose some of their power and you'll ‘defeat’ them. This only applies to very weak Allies. Many of the Allies I've encountered simply grinned and grunted when I tried to compress them. They didn't shrink at all! And yet, they were deeply offended by my unceremonious behavior. I suspect they were from the far reaches of space, where energy has a different nature and properties.

Many Allies are very dangerous. I had cats with thick tails and wasps; they were quite serious ‘creatures.’ The more peaceful ones resembled spiders and fish, for example.

Most Allies have a very dull psychology. It's based on the principle of ‘rob and run,’ and apparently that's why animal images are closest to their true nature. Of course, I'm talking about the images you encounter when you emerge from your dream on your ‘subtle’ plane. Fortunately, most people never see them. Within the dream, however, you'll see any image you can imagine, since it's merely a projection of a ‘creature’ outside of you, perhaps already embedded in your Soul.

When I started my journey, new Allies arrived every day, dozens and hundreds of them, all shapes and sizes. They came to meet me, hoping I would choose them. Curiously, I was completely at ease with their company; I didn't experience any particular negative emotions toward them, rather, pleasant, sometimes even sensual and romantic experiences. But I was perfectly aware of who I was interacting with, and everything happened as if I knew it was meant to be.

When I didn't choose anyone, and they didn't suit me primarily because, in my view, they were weak and useless, the second stage of communication began—they started attacking. They attacked every day, every hour. I once calculated that there were up to 12 attacks a day. But this was, of course, a record; on a typical day, there were maybe five attacks. There were no days without attacks at all. And considering that an Ally usually needs some time to rest and recuperate after an attack, there were a lot of them involved; I estimate that up to 20–30 ‘creatures’ were active per day. They attacked in waves; when one group rested, the next team would join in.

I was a ‘tasty morsel’ for the Allies. Perhaps some peculiarity of mine, inherent in the energetic nature of black magicians and constantly attracting them like nectar, manifested itself. For some reason, they thought I was very weak, and that they were just about to ‘finish’ me. Perhaps this was how the black magicians tamed them and then used them for their own purposes. But I had no need for the Allies—unfortunately, I had no intention of using them. After a few years, they probably began to realize this, and now they're apparently fed up with me.

It's a common misconception that the Allies came to plunder in pursuit of strong emotions. Perhaps this is because humans themselves strive to experience as many strong and vivid emotions as possible. However, this is not true. The Allies are extremely averse to strong human emotions; they need a constant, gentle boost, nothing more.

There's also a theory that they devour your memories and your consciousness in general. I won't argue with that; I don't have any definitive data on that yet... Perhaps the Allies devoured this information? After 20 years, I still haven't figured out whether they feed on my memories or not. Perhaps my memories are too unpalatable for them. However, they do consume all the waste products of the Soul, that's absolutely certain. In doing so, they purify the Soul to a certain extent.

Operating under the Allies' sight, you can never be sure of anything. Any feeling or thought you have can work against you. For example, an Ally might suggest to you that another, smaller Ally has bitten into your ear. And you even see and feel the image of another Ally! You struggle to separate the Ally from your ear and throw it away—congratulations, you've just thrown away a piece of your energy! But what about the supposed image? The Ally, through sheer force of will, has drawn part of your energy, shaped it into the form of a smaller Ally, even slightly animated it, and then implanted the corresponding thought in you. The same applies to your desires to ‘take off clothes or shoes’ in a dream, or to go to the toilet. Allies also love to pretend to be dentists, surgeons, and even bathhouse workers.

An Ally might demonstrate a supposed flaw in your energy and instill the idea that it needs to be urgently repaired. You're already wasting a ton of energy trying to fix a non-existent flaw, while the Ally feasts on your wasted energy. This also includes dreams where you need to help someone or save an entire planet. And so you're already wasting a ton of energy ‘setting the table’ for the voracious Allies.

One of the Allies' advantages is that they expend a large amount of their energy to ensure their victims feel comfortable interacting with them. They first absorb all the person's energy, which they deem superfluous, and then release a large amount of their own dark energy. Interestingly, people will never be grateful to them for this, perhaps because they don't see it happening.

When a person loses their energy, they feel it and fight for it. But when they use the free energy of the Allies, they may not even be aware of it, believing it's their own personal energy, accumulated over several months of training or received as a gift from fate. I'm sorry to disappoint you, but many newcomers—those who travels with up to 5 years of experience—run solely on fuel supplied almost selflessly by the Allies, whom they may never have even met. This can be seen as a prey-baiting process before fishing.

About 5 years after I started my journey, I no longer paid much attention to the Allies, and their main goal was no longer so much to attack, but rather to somehow attract my attention at first.

This is an important point. In order to attack, an Ally needs to have your attention. If an Ally doesn't have your attention, they won't be able to attack, nor will they be able to cause any other harm.