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[Alexandr Korol]

of his works? So much came from his personal biography, his personal life — things that for us are now literary masterpieces. Why should we shift the focus to the person and discuss Pushkin himself? His works speak for themselves and are instructive for all of us. How he was inspired, where it all came from — that’s not as important. It’s the same here. This is simply a literary work — a novel. Everyone takes something personal from it. And that “wow” effect... like, say, in the movie “Harry Potter” — some of the filming locations used were actual, real places in the human world. Of course, I used real worlds too — I mean real places. There’s a lot in it that is real. The question is: what is reality? Maybe it’s worth thinking about why a reader — who might not even know me yet — when reading “Alternative History,” will believe in it more than in real life. That’s the real question. I believe that’s simply the author’s skill.

Question: You share information with your friends about everything that has happened to you. So does that mean they don’t feel anything at all, since even your parents are saying you’ve lost your mind? Or does time play a role — after all, there are gaps of about six months between when you first heard about Big Alexander and when you met him, and also with the keys to paradise — there was a six-month to one-year gap there too. So during these periods, do you often tell this story to your friends, or to each one individually in the “cosmos,” and then they discuss it among themselves and come to the conclusion that they need to report it to your parents?

No, you... You’re imagining it as if... Let’s say we imagine a person who works a job and then goes home to a family with kids — you immediately picture it all happening together in some shared space: the family, the kids, right? And here you’re probably imagining friends the same way — that these are just “friends.” But friends can be very different, and I’d even say they come from entirely different worlds. The friends who are of the heart, of the soul, the spiritual ones — even they aren’t friends with each other. They’re not even acquainted. And that’s an important detail to note: that if you have a friend — doesn’t matter if it’s a guy or a girl — someone you always interact with one-on-one, and that person never talks about you to anyone, and you never talk about them to anyone, and you don’t introduce them to your coworkers or family, and they don’t introduce you either... if it’s just that person, one-on-one, then it feels like