'In a way unknown to me' is, of course, a quote from Kharms; the full phrase is: 'So, life conquered death in a way unknown to me.' I don't know if everyone remembers that these words are spoken by a thin-necked man who 'climbed into a chest, closed the lid behind him, and began to suffocate.' And then found himself lying on the floor. The chest was nowhere to be found. The chest had disappeared! All the stories in the book are roughly about this. Or at least for this. So that all these chests of yours would disappear, one after another. The story 'Forty-Third' was published in the collection 'Nada,' the story 'The Head and the Lyre Floated Along Gebru' in the collection 'Cards on the Table.' It would have been absolutely impossible to do without them; the chests disperse so effectively in these stories. The remaining texts are being published for the first time.