SGreetings, Germany, you are the best refuge for a Russian writer who has decided to live in Europe, half insane from all the lies and the stench in his homeland. Germany, you are perhaps the only country on the continent that is willing to absorb the culture of both its eastern and western neighbors alike, starting from a strong culture of its own. In the wartime spring of 2022 I set off to live in France, the country I am most familiar with, but I slowed down and stopped in Berlin and now I’ve been here for nine months enjoying exchanges and working with a wide circle of ordinary and not at all common Germans in different parts of this country.
During these months I lived in the Heinrich Böll House near Aachen and in Wiepersdorf Castle in the Brandenburg Forest, I taught at the Universities of Lüneburg and Halle and I hope to be able to continue this activity. I’ve prepared new books for printing, written articles, performed at the Stadttheater Freiburg – Germany is extremely kind to me. On the level of philosophy and friendly contact, I feel light and comfortable here. But this year will go down in human history as the year of monstrous snarling. No country bares its teeth but mine. There is reason enough to hold your head up and despair. I won’t hide the fact that I knew that war was inevitable. It all boiled down to that. I wrote about this in the FAZ long before the start of the war. I knew it would be senseless and merciless, just as Pushkin described the Russian rebellion of the time. But this is not an inner-Russian protest uprising, but a war to destroy an entire country.
