Long look to America

Part 1

From the author

The word is the work of the writer. What is written is done. As it is written, so it is done.

And what is not written is not done. And what has not been done can be done not with a hasty author's preface, but with a new word, a new book.

Why does the hand still reach for the preface?

This book is special for me. It includes three of more than a dozen of my books about the USA, the three that I consider the main ones. They were written over the past fifteen years, at intervals of approximately five years each. In the form of personal impressions, sensations, thoughts and inevitable memories, they reflect more. than twenty years of experience in understanding the country in which I had the opportunity to live for eleven years, doing the work of a newspaper correspondent, and then visit many times. The last of the included books, even in its title, indicates a certain outcome of all this - the journey of an Americanist. Not immediately and unnoticed by me, my life became the life of an Americanist, that is, a person writing about America.

Each of the three books was written separately, without any thought of continuation. But life continued, again and again giving birth to the need to express what did not fit on the newspaper page. I didn't think about a continuation, but the result was a kind of trilogy with internal echoes and connections between its New York and California parts, with the logic of the development of the author's view of America, himself, and the world.

The poet embraced the immensity, saying that books are written about time and about oneself. I also write about a century and a person - about the nuclear age and about a person who found himself at the junction of two nuclear powers, his own and someone else's. This is a long look at America by a Russian Soviet man. And at the same time, an Americanist's view of his country.

Every socially minded person seeks his own path to the Fatherland and his native people. Due to the current circumstances of my life, I was looking for it in the most complete, sincere, reliable description of America and Americans and that era that connected us with the chains of a common fate, a common semblance of survival.

How far this path has been found, how far it has been traveled, the reader will determine - to the best of his understanding and generosity.