Page 115

[Alexandr Korol]

Question: Could you please tell us how circumstances led you to meet the Mystic-Old-Man?

It was an interesting case. The point is that everything that happened to me in 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011 wasn’t connected to readers at all. They exist now, but back then I had my own kind of world — my real, physical life, where there were friends, schoolmates, university classmates, friends of friends, various acquaintances. Everything happened among them. I only later described it in books, and outsiders read it. I always kept my distance; readers for me were people who found out about me through books or the internet, and that’s where they should stay. I was supposed to be an internet character for them. I always tried to maintain that boundary. And there was a very interesting case: friends of friends whose family had a restaurant on Bolshaya or Malaya Morskaya in St. Petersburg... And as I understand it, their kids told their parents about me — that there’s this boy who sees and hears things, who’s all special, who writes some books. And they told this to a mutual family friend. His name was, interestingly, also Alexandr. He really wanted to meet me. And so he, let’s say, “signed up” for a consultation with me, if that’s what you can call it. And this was probably 2009. So before the messengers, even before Big Alexander, before all of it. Let’s call him Alexandr “the Businessman,” because he was that kind of businessman — always in a suit and tie after work. We could meet once a week and chat. And this Alexandr “the Businessman” was a friend of my friends, so I could trust him. He wasn’t some random guy from the internet but a real Petersburger who worked at a serious company at that time. And we met in a café near my house, where I lived on Moskovskaya, Victory Square. And he just asked some personal questions. Just personal questions for himself, like he was talking to some sort of psychologist, I guess. I don’t know how to explain it, but he talked to me as if I were super smart and could share some perspective, and that was very interesting to him. And he endlessly asked me about everything imaginable — both about himself and the world: whether I believe there’s a soul, whether God exists, how I picture that God, why we all live, why bad things happen to people, why there are people like this and others like that. Basically, all the things I’d been pondering since childhood, all the things I used to write about in my diary. Maybe someone gave him my diary to read before we met,