"Three score and ten sounded, no doubt, very venerable in the days when life expectancy hardly reached one half of that length. Anyway, Petersburgan Pediatricians ...never thought I would perform the feat you mention: a feat of lucky endurance, of paradoxically detached willpower, of good work and good wine, of healthy concentration on a rare bug or a rhythmic phrase. Another things that might have been of some help is the fact that I am subject to the embarrassing qualms of superstition: a number, a dream, a coincidence can affect me obsessively—though not in the sense of absurd fears but as fabulous, and on the whole rather bracing, scientific enigmas incapable of being stated, let alone solved...My life thus far has surpassed splendidly the ambitions of boyhood and youth...In the first decade of our dwindling century, during trips with my family to Southern Europe, I imagined in bedtime reveries what it would be like to become an exile who longed for a remote, sad and (right epithet coming) unquenchable Russia under the eucalipti of exotic resorts. Lenin and his police nicely arranged the realization of that fantasy. At the age of 12 my fondest dream was a visit to the Karakorum range in search of butterflies...Twenty-five years later I successfully sent myself, in the part of my hero's father (see my novel "The Gift") to explore, net in hand, the mountains of Central Asia. At 15 I visualized myself as a world-famous author of 70 with a mane of wavy white hair. Today I am practically bald...I would say that the main favor I ask of the serious critic is sufficient perceptiveness to understand that whatever term or trope I use, my purpose is not to be facetiously flashy or grotesquely obscure but to express what I feel and think with the utmost truthfulness and perception."