No, I wasn't specifically afraid of wild animals, I just didn't have a chance to be particularly afraid. Well, we used to have wild boars in Persia, they were in the steppe, they went into the garden; There were other wild animals, but they prowled at night, and they still did not let me out of the house at night, so there was nothing particularly terrible. And I was afraid of the dark room, but I did not hide such things. On the one hand, I have never been laughed at for any fears, prejudices, or childish qualities; And my father, in those periods when we were together, developed masculine qualities in me simply by telling me about courageous deeds, about what kind of people they were, and therefore I myself was drawn to this. Not to some special heroism, but to the fact that there is such a concept as courage, which is very high and beautiful; Therefore, as a boy, I brought myself up a lot in discipline. When I began to become more conscious, when I was eleven or twelve years old, I cultivated physical endurance in myself. My father, for example, considered it a shame if you took a hot pot and let it out of your hands: hold it! And if you burn your fingers, then we'll see. This also applied to fatigue, to pain, to cold, and so on. I brought myself up very much in this regard, because it seemed to me that this was true! This is a masculine quality. When I was about fifteen or sixteen years old, I slept for years with the window open without a blanket, and when it was cold, I got up, did gymnastics, went back to bed – well, all this for the future, as it were.

     Then the school years went further, three years at the same school. Why? It was the cheapest, first of all, and then the only one at that time around Paris and in Paris itself, where I could live. Then I was transferred to another one – it was just an earthly paradise, ladybugs, after what I had seen in the first school; The most ardent were just like pictures.

     Did you accept school discipline?

     I was too lazy to be a mischievous boy; I had a feeling that pranks were simply not worth it. I was not interested in school, I was only interested in Russian organizations; And besides, I discovered a very important thing: if you do not study well, you sit in the same class for two years, and since I wanted to get rid of school as soon as possible, I always studied in such a way as not to stay too long; This was my main engine. And some subjects I loved and dealt with them; That is, "some", the plural is almost an exaggeration, because I was fond of Latin. I have always been interested in and fascinated by languages, I liked Latin terribly, because at the same time as Latin I became interested in architecture, and Latin and architecture have the same property: it is a language that is built according to certain rules, just like you build a building – grammar, syntax, word position, and the ratio of words – and this captivated me with Latin. I loved German, German poetry, which I still love. When I was about ten years old, I read a lot about architecture, and then I calmed down, became interested in something else – the military system, what was called Motherland Studies, that is, everything that related to Russia – history, geography, language, again; and life for it. I studied in a French school, and there was no ideological underpinning: they just came, studied and left, or lived in a boarding school, but still there was nothing behind it.

     Were you classmates at school or in the organization?

     No. There were comrades in the organization, that is, people, boys, whom I loved more or less, but I never went to anyone and never invited anyone.

     Principle?

     There was simply no desire; I liked to sit alone in my room at home. I hung on my wall a quotation from Vauvenargs: "He who comes to me will do me honor; whoever does not come, will give me pleasure"; And the only time I invited the boy to visit, he looked at the quote and left. I have never been sociable; I loved to read, loved to live with my thoughts, and loved Russian organizations. I saw them as a place where something was forged out of us, and I didn't care who was with me, as long as he shared these thoughts; Whether I liked him or not, I didn't care at all, as long as he was ready to stand up for these things.

     I was no longer living in a school, I had a little more time, and I ended up in my first Russian organization, a scout organization, like the pioneers, which differed from the others in that, in addition to the usual summer camp activities, such as tents, fires, cooking in the street, forest hikes, and so on, Russian culture and Russian consciousness were instilled in us; From the age of ten or eleven we were taught the military formation, and all this in order to one day return to Russia and give back to Russia everything that we could collect in the West, so that we could be really, both physically and mentally, ready for this... This is what we have been taught for a number of years; summer camps lasted a month and a half, strict, severe camps; usually three hours a day of military formation, gymnastics, sports, there were classes in Russian subjects; they slept on the bare ground, ate very little, because then it was very difficult to find any money at all, but they lived very happily. Thin people returned home; No matter how much we swam – in the river, in the sea – we returned indescribably dirty, because, of course, we swam more than we washed ourselves. And so, from year to year, a large community of young people was built. The last time I was no longer a boy, but an adult, and I was in charge of such a summer camp, there were more than a thousand of us in various camps in the south of France, young men and women, girls and boys.

     In 1927 (simply because the group in which I was a member had broken up) I joined another organization called Vityazi, which was organized by the Russian Student Christian Movement, where I put down roots and where I stayed; In general, I have never left there – until now. Everything was the same there, but there were two things: the cultural level was much higher, much more was expected of us in the field of reading and in the field of knowledge of Russia; And the other feature was religiosity, there was a priest at the organization and there was a church in the camps. And in this organization I made a number of discoveries. Firstly, from the field of culture; It seems that all my stories about culture are shameful and condemning to me, but there is nothing I can do. I remember once in our circle I was given the first task - I think I was about fourteen years old - to read an essay on the topic "fathers and sons". At that time my culture did not reach the point of knowing that Turgenev had written a book under that title. And so I sat and sweated and thought about what I could say on this topic. I sat for a week, thought it over and, of course, did not think of anything. I remember coming to a meeting of the circle, climbing into a corner in the hope that they would forget, maybe he would carry it. Of course, they called me, sat me on a stool and said: well?.. I sat for a while, crumpled and said: I have been thinking about the topic given to me all week... And he fell silent. Then, in the profound silence that followed, he added: but I have not thought of anything. That was the end of the first lecture I gave in my life.

     And then, as far as the Church is concerned, I was very anti-church because of what I saw in the lives of my fellow Catholics or Protestants, so God did not exist for me, and the Church was a purely negative phenomenon. My main experience in this regard was, perhaps, as follows. When we found ourselves in exile in 1923, the Catholic Church offered scholarships for Russian boys and girls to go to school. I remember my mother taking me to the "viewings", someone talked to me and to my mother too, and everything was arranged, and we thought that it was already in the hat. And we were about to leave when the man who was talking to us stopped us for a moment and said, "Of course, this presupposes that the boy will become a Catholic." And I remember getting up and saying to my mother: let's go, I don't want you to sell me. And after that I finished with the Church, because I had the feeling that if it was the Church, then, really, there was absolutely no need to go there and be interested in it at all; There was just nothing in it for me... I have to say that I wasn't the only one; In the summer, when there were camps, there was vigil on Saturday, Liturgy on Sunday, and we systematically did not get up for Liturgy, but turned away the sides of the tent so that the authorities could see that we were lying in bed and not going anywhere. So, you see, the background for my religiosity was very dubious. In addition, some attempts were made to develop me in this sense: once a year, on Good Friday, I was taken to church, and I made a remarkable discovery from the first time, which was useful to me forever (that is, for that period): I discovered that if I entered the church for three steps, pulled my nose deeply and inhaled incense, I instantly fainted. And so I never went beyond the third step to church. I fainted and was taken home, and that was the end of my annual religious torture.

     And in this organization I discovered one thing that at first puzzled me very much. In 1927, there was a priest in a children's camp who seemed ancient to us—he was probably thirty years old, but he had a big beard, long hair, sharp features, and one thing that none of us could explain to ourselves: that he had enough love for everyone. He didn't love us in return for love, affection, he didn't love us as a reward for being "good" or obedient, or something like that. He just had love pouring over the edge of his heart. Everyone could get all of it, not just a fraction or a drop, and it was never taken away. The only thing that happened was that this love for some boy or girl was a joy or a great sorrow for him. But these were, as it were, two sides of the same love; it never diminished, never wavered. And indeed, if you read in the Apostle Paul about love, that love believes in everything, hopes for everything, never ceases, and so on, all this could be found in him, and I could not understand it at the time. I knew that my mother loved me, that my father loved me, that my grandmother loved me, this was the whole circle of my life from the field of affectionate relations. But why a person who is a stranger to me can love me and could love others who were also strangers to him, was completely unknown to me. Only later, many years later, did I understand where it came from. But then it was a question mark that arose in my mind, an unsolvable question.

     At that time I remained in this organization, life went on normally, I developed in the Russian order very consciously and very ardently and with conviction; At home we always spoke Russian, our element was Russian, I spent all my free time in our organization. We did not specifically like the French (my mother used to say how good France would be if there were no French), we called them natives – without malice, but just like that, we just walked by; They were the environment of life, just like trees, or cats, or whatever. We encountered French people or French families at work or at school and nothing else, and it didn't go any further. A certain amount of Western culture was instilled, but we did not join the feelings.

     From the memories of relations with the French, this is when we were already living on Saint-Louis-en-l'Isle; Mother got a job as a literary secretary for a publisher, and her master said to her one day when she couldn't come to work: "Know, madam, that death alone, your death, can be an excuse for not coming to work..."