I Wish You Happiness. Afthor (collection)

These strange “for life” pictures—hasty pictures from a notebook that, as I believed, simply do not have the right to be published—appeared so long ago that, when naming the year and circumstances, I must explain something in detail.

As for free speech, not soiled with the author’s remarks: all my life I’ve dreamed of writing a book of monologues. I love hearing stories in the first person…

The most sincere, the most reckless monologues are a special kind of confession: desperate, final—because it is well known that you can fully get everything off your chest only in front of the person you’re unlikely to meet in the rest of your life. And if you do meet them, both of you will pretend that that conversation, that open heart, simply never happened. But in those moments when a lonely voice sounds, there are no people closer in the world than the storyteller and the listener.

This—my ideal for a monologue story—is a lonely, passionate voice, leading the account of its fate with trusting abandon. So that, in the minutes when the reader opens the book and becomes the only listener—besides us two—there would be no one else…