I can swear: dumping, of course, together with my family and the hope of not being abandoned by the Muse of prose, from “Kafka made true” (as Vagrich Bakhchanyan said), into the stunning civilization of the New World, I never dreamed of meeting the first of the three my Muses; her arrival, always invisible, but beautiful, literally threw me in New England behind the display of the Apple, and from under the keys spontaneously burst forth lines of imitation of the beloved poets of ancient China.

Our province is a quiet backwater of laziness behind bend down like a frog and old Yuz-Fu’s messages fly to us, sometimes he finds them in an old basket of willow twigs

Without trying to reveal the secret of the origin, either in my soul or in my head, of poetic images that required immediate embodiment in words of one or several stanzas, no less imperiously than fledgling chicks demanding nutritious worms and flies from their parent birds, I, betraying prose and forgetting about time, joyfully followed the dictates of the Muse and Language; I was intoxicated, as in my youth, by sounds, rhythms, by simple, previously amazing, but differently perceived wonders of nature and by the joys of existence; after a few years - some of the most pleasant in life, alas, quickly passed - "Lines of a goose feather found in a foreign land" were formed, and the Muse with fair winds again flew away somewhere, as if she had never arrived, as if she had not turned me into Yuz- Phew, an old poet, a drunken tramp, head over heels in love with his maid of honor And... the Muse disappeared from my life, but not from my heart, which cannot forget how, even before I fell over the hill, she gifted me in the groves of Krasnaya Pakhra with muttering lines and stanzas, - to me, the only real poem in my life - here are its first lines: Under the shadow of tremulous autumn yellow wings, on the shore of divine separation... Yuz Aleshkovsky