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[Alexandr Korol]

playing pranks and scaring innocent, modest people — women, men, children — that person, you see, is the one hanging out with pop stars, appearing on every talk show, all over TV, all over social media, and it’s the same with those kinds of women and those kinds of men. And the more dirt they put out there, the more they get praised and admired. Can you imagine what I see? And society supports it. People repeat the same jokes, and now I see this not just globally, but in Russia too. What is that? So it turns out that if someone like me shows up — someone proper, someone clean — they immediately want to do what? Completely smear that person in filth, destroy them, drag them down to their level, to that dirty level, so that person doesn’t show off or act like they’re better. They’ll try to dig up anything they can on him, any dirt, any compromising detail, and smear him in everything to say, “Look, he’s just like us, he’s no better.” And everything is just “into the mud, into the mud, into the mud,” and everyone cheers for that. And that’s so strange. It should be the other way around: if someone is uncultured, immoral, a troublemaker... Back then it used to be shameful to be that way, but now it’s considered normal. And if I’m not like that, now that’s considered not normal. So maybe being cultured and decent is what protects me from all sorts of temptations, what shields me from all those dark people — maybe it’s this inner culture of mine, these high values, that have saved me all this time and kept me safe from the dark. But I’ll say this — it’s hard to live with this in a dark age, when everyone else is a hyena and you’re a rabbit. The hyenas have taken over the whole world to the point where there’s not even anywhere left to go for a walk. I have to sit here in my rabbit hole and not stick my head out, just keep writing books. I’ll say that these high values — since you asked about them — they’re probably the main thing that gave me... I mean, they’re the strength that kept me from getting lost, from going astray in all the corrupt trials people go through. At times, I even voluntarily tried to dirty myself, tried to get into it all, just because I was tired of always holding the line and being alone. But still... You know how people often say things like, “You can take the person out of the village, but you can’t take the village out of the person”? Well with me, it’s the opposite — no matter what kind of village I move into, no matter how many messy people I surround myself with, this pedigree of mine, you can’t get it out of me. No matter how much I tried to muddy it up to be closer to people, so they wouldn’t get so triggered and angry — it never leaves me. It’s a part of who I am.