No one is interested in real victims, or real criminals. Not local courts, not their fellow citizens, not publishers, and not readers. Everyone simply refuses to believe them. An imaginary crime is much more convincing; reality is too real. They can only identify with an invented crime, only paper evil can excite them.

Who knows, maybe one day there will no longer be Literature. Instead there will be literary web sites. Like those stars, still shining but long dead, the web sites will testify to the existence of past writers. There will be quotes, fragments of texts, which prove that there used to be complete texts once. Instead of readers there will be cyber space travelers who will stumble upon the websites by chance and stop for a moment to gaze at them. How they will read them? Like hieroglyphs? As we read the instructions for a dishwasher today? Or like remnants of a strange communication that meant something in the past, and was called Literature?

As an outsider I was free to pick my own literary traditions, to build my own system of literary values.

Stephen King is just one of the numerous modern engineers of human souls. This mega-writer got a mega-advance of seventeen million dollars for his latest book. The communist soul engineers would get an advance on their future historical guilt, crates of vodka, cirrhosis of the liver, and the constant possibility of a knock on the door from the KGB.