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[Alexandr Korol]

came to see me. So quite a few people came to visit me, though individually, of course — just acquaintances who don’t even live in Russia. And what’s most interesting is, I didn’t invite them. And I was surprised because with these people it’s usually not easy to meet — you always have to plan six months in advance, they live outside of Russia — and yet here they suddenly decided to come to this dump. And it was obvious that they had this crazy interest. I don’t know what they expected to see there, because at that time I wouldn’t say I was writing books about flying saucers or power spots in Karelia. No, that wasn’t the case. Basically, I was just focused on construction. Maybe the whole pandemic affected them so much that for them it was some kind of sign or association, like — how is it that Alexandr Korol, who lived in the United States, suddenly went off to live in the forest in Karelia, and then the pandemic began? Maybe people started to associate it with something bigger, like it wasn’t just a coincidence. Although of course it had nothing to do with the pandemic. I went looking for land and returned to Russia before the pandemic, in August 2019, and by September I was already looking at land, in September and October. I bought the land before New Year’s. And it was only when 2020 started that all the strange global upheavals began, so it wasn’t related at all. That’s the first point. And why am I saying all this? Just to note that those who visited — maybe just five people in total. A couple of foreigners, a couple of folks from St. Petersburg or Moscow. And all of them, as if on cue, said the same thing — that they were surprised to see how genuinely happy I was there, and that I didn’t need the city, all that trendy, flashy, luxury stuff, that I didn’t need New York, that I didn’t need Moscow or Petersburg, and that I was just in the forest and felt good. That’s what they all told me — that they were shocked by it. Like, how could that be? And I was so happy — it triggered associations because the code was the same — I started to see it as a visual, like I had experienced that kind of happiness before Karelia when I was in the summer camp “Zerkalny” at 14, 15, 16 years old — that same feeling. Back then I felt a crazy kind of happiness. And here, it was like I was in some kind of kids’ camp again, like I had become a child — because you could pull out a kite, you could take out a remote-controlled plane, a drone for underwater exploration, and I’ve always loved, even back at my grandmother’s dacha, going through fields with a metal detector — you could walk around with a detector, dig a well, make something out of wood, go fishing.