One and the Same Book (Odna i Ta Zhe Kniga)

'Life and dreams are pages of the same book,' the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once wrote, and I repeat after him, enchanted, because it resembles the truth more than the truth itself.
And here you have a couple of hundred pages, torn from my personal, endless (I hope) book - at random, blindly - mixed and stitched together many years ago. This book includes stories, essays, and simply working notes, made over the years, wherever and whenever: on napkins in cafes, on a computer and in a notebook, in the sand, in the margins of other people's books, with an indelible pencil on the wrist, with a razor blade on the heels of a runner, in reality and in a dream.