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[Alexandr Korol]

But I also saw that aside from the socially-material people — who may be very conservative, who can’t see the world as broadly as I can and as those in the “corridor” can — so, a socially-material person is conservative, a skeptic, and everyone has their own fixed angle — only this way and no other. And because of that, even all the socially-material worlds differ from one another. But then there was also that world of the “lost” — and it’s a very bad one. And this is where it’s now important to properly observe the boundaries of understanding between these worlds. There’s the material world — it’s a good one: it contains all sorts of people, those who have made something of themselves or who are on their way. And then there’s the world of the “lost,” and that world of the “lost” is the society — that is, it’s trends, judgment, gossip, envy, everyone copying each other, everyone looking the same. And back when I was just beginning to write books, this society... It was like a separate sphere people could fall into, like a bubble — and they could still get out of it. Back then, that bubble wasn’t so big. But now it’s grown immensely, as if it has swallowed both the material and spiritual worlds — this society. And I can quickly describe in a few words how I see it.

Imagine that I was born in St. Petersburg and lived there when I started writing my first books. I saw, for example, that this street, those venues, those people — they were, let’s say, socially-material and good. And then at some point, a place, as I used to say, became vulgarized. Meaning, I could go to some café or restaurant, or love a certain street, and then stop going there. And that happened because the society had swallowed it. Figuratively speaking, take Rubinstein Street in 2008–2009 — it hadn’t been vulgarized yet; it was good, socially-material in a good way. And then by 2019 the society arrived there — it had come even earlier, but by 2019 it was clearly visible, by 2018 too, like ten years later. What does that mean, what am I talking about? It turns out that earlier, some venue, restaurant, shop was only known to those from that world. For example, there’s someone living in Petrogradka, the Petrogradsky District, and he goes to a nice café near his home, and all the people who live there go there too. They’re all well-mannered and don’t intersect with other worlds. Of course, there’s another café on the same street where completely different people go — also socially-material, but on a different level.