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[Alexandr Korol]

have everything turned upside down in their head — well, why not? I even had that kind of impression from a music track recently. Then, of course, I returned to my standard stable mood, but I was under the influence, and under that influence I could’ve done something rash. But that already depends on how farsighted you are, how much self-control you have. You can, you know, watch a film about love and drop everything for the sake of love. And then that feeling you got from the film fades after three days — but you already dropped everything, and there’s no love. So what, is the film to blame? No, of course the film didn’t tell you to do that — but you were inspired by love, weren’t you? Inspired. That’s what it was for — to experience those feelings. Maybe it reminded someone that it’s time to forgive someone, or maybe it reminded someone else that love and family might be more important than money. You see, everyone has different reactions. And someone else, on the contrary — someone with a family, children, and a job — might realize it’s not real love, then see true love and romance in the film and decide to leave everything behind for it, and in the end have neither romance nor family. So why did he do that because of a film? Well, that’s just how that person is — it’s him, not the film. People react differently. Someone might play a video game and think they can do awful things in real life like in those games — but not everyone does that. So if someone loses touch with reality, that means something was wrong with the person, not the game, because others don’t lose it. It’s like with art. Believe me, my book is a thousand times less intense on the psyche — if I may put it bluntly — than modern art in Moscow, if you go to one of those exhibitions. Seriously. So when you look at these modern art exhibitions in Moscow... Sure, there are talented people, some do things with real quality — but I’m a very sensitive person, and I get the feeling that many of those who made this, I don’t know what they’re connected to, what angle of perception they have, but it scares me. Because there are different approaches. Like, take some kind of auteur cinema — someone can make a two- hour film of a person scratching a table with their nails until they bleed, fingers dripping with blood, and it’s in black and white, and someone is moaning. And then at the Cannes festival everyone applauds and says it’s genius. But I get scared, because maybe that really is some unusual angle of looking at life and the kind of energy, the frequency put into it, yeah? And maybe that does tingle people’s nerves, and they like it. But I prefer when, sure, you might step out of