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..."

     When I was about fourteen years old, we had for the first time a room (in Bois-Colombes) where all three of us could live: grandmother, mother and I; My father lived on the way out—I'll tell you about that in a minute—and before that we lived as I told you, who was where and who how. And for the first time in my life since my childhood had ended, when we were driving from Persia, I suddenly experienced some possibility of happiness; To this day, when I have dreams of blissful happiness, they take place in this apartment. For two or three months it was just cloudless bliss. And suddenly something completely unexpected happened to me: I was afraid of happiness. Suddenly it seemed to me that happiness was worse than the very difficult happiness that had happened before, because when life was all about struggle, self-defense, or an attempt to survive, there was a goal in life: you had to survive now, you had to make sure that you could survive a little later, you had to know where to sleep, you had to know how to get something to eat, in that order. And when it suddenly turned out that all this minute-by-minute struggle was gone, it turned out that life was completely empty, because is it possible to build your whole life on the fact that grandmother, mother and I love each other – but aimlessly? That there is no depth in this, that there is no eternity, no future, that all life is in captivity of two dimensions: time and space, and there is no depth in it; Maybe there is some thickness, it can be some centimeters, but nothing else, the bottom at once. And it seemed that if life was as meaningless as it seemed to me – meaningless happiness – then I would not agree to live. And I made a vow to myself that if I did not find the meaning of life within a year, I would commit suicide, because I did not agree to live for meaningless, aimless happiness.

     My father lived apart from us; he took a peculiar position: when we found ourselves in emigration, he decided that his class, his social group, bore a heavy responsibility for everything that happened in Russia, and that he had no right to enjoy the advantages that his upbringing, education, and his class gave him. And so he did not look for any job where he could use his knowledge of Eastern languages, his university education, Western languages, and became a laborer. And within a fairly short time he undermined his strength, then worked in an office and died at the age of fifty-three (May 2, 1937). But he instilled a few things in me. He was a very courageous, firm, fearless man before life; I remember once I came back from a summer vacation, and he met me and said: "I was worried about you this summer." I half-jokingly answered him: "Were you afraid that I would break my leg or crash?" It would be all the same. I was afraid that you would lose your honor." And then he added: "Remember: whether you are alive or dead must be completely indifferent to you, as it should be indifferent to others; The only thing that matters is what you live for and what you are willing to die for." And about death he once told me a thing that remained to me and then was reflected very strongly when he himself died; he once said: "Death must be waited for as a young man waits for the arrival of his bride." And he lived alone, in extreme poverty; I prayed, was silent, read ascetic literature, and really lived completely alone, mercilessly alone, I must say. He had a tiny little room upstairs in a tall house, and on the door he had a note: "Don't bother knocking: I'm home, but I won't open it." I remember once I came to him and knocked: "Dad! This is me!.. No, he did not. Because he met with people only on Sundays, and all week long he walked home from work, locked himself up, fasted, prayed, read.

     And so, when I decided to commit suicide, I had behind me: these two phrases of my father, something that I caught in him, the strange experience of this priest (incomprehensible in its quality and type of love) – and that's it, and nothing else. And it so happened that during the Great Lent of some year, I think it was the thirtieth, our leaders began to take us, boys, to the volleyball field. Once we got together, it turned out that we had invited a priest to hold a spiritual conversation with us, savages. Well, of course, everyone shied away from this as best they could, those who managed to escape, ran away; those who had the courage to resist to the end, resisted; But the manager persuaded me. He did not persuade me that I should go, because it would be good for my soul or anything like that, because if he had agreed on the soul or on God, I would not have believed him. But he said: "Listen, we have invited Father Sergius Bulgakov; can you imagine what he will spread about us around the city if no one comes to talk?" And he also added a wonderful phrase: "I'm not asking you to listen! You sit and think your thoughts, just be there." I thought that perhaps I could, and I went. And everything was really good; only, unfortunately, Father Sergius Bulgakov spoke too loudly and prevented me from thinking my thoughts; and I began to listen, and what he was saying put me in such a state of rage that I could not tear myself away from what he was saying; I remember him talking about Christ, about the Gospel, about Christianity. He was a wonderful theologian and he was a wonderful man for adults, but he had no experience with children, and he spoke as one speaks to small animals, bringing to our consciousness all the sweet things that can be found in the Gospel, from which we would just shy away, and I shied away: meekness, humility, quietness – all the slavish qualities of which we are reproached, from Nietzsche onwards. He put me in such a state that I decided not to return to the volleyball field, despite the fact that it was the passion of my life, but to go home, to try to find out if we had a Gospel at home somewhere, to check and finish it; It didn't even occur to me that I wouldn't end it, because it was quite obvious that he knew his stuff, and so it was...

     And so I asked my mother for the Gospel that she had, locked myself in my corner, looked at the book and found that there were four Gospels, and if there were four, then one of them, of course, should be shorter than the others. And since I did not expect anything good from any of the four, I decided to read the shortest one. And then I got caught; I have found many times after this how cunning God can be when He sets His nets to catch fish; because if I had read another Gospel, I would have had difficulties; there is some kind of cultural basis behind each Gospel; Mark, on the other hand, wrote for such young savages as I did, for the young men of Rome. I didn't know that, but God did. And Mark knew, perhaps, when he wrote shorter than the others...

     And so I sat down to read; And here you may take my word for it, because you can't prove it. What happened to me is what sometimes happens on the street, you know, when you walk – and suddenly you turn around, because you feel that someone is looking at you from behind. I was sitting, reading, and between the beginning of the first and the beginning of the third chapter of the Gospel of Mark, which I read slowly because the language was unaccustomed, I suddenly felt that on the other side of the table, here, stood Christ... And it was such a striking feeling that I had to stop, stop reading and watching. I stared for a long time; I did not see anything, I did not hear anything, I did not feel anything with my feelings. But even as I looked straight ahead at the place where there was no one, I had the same vivid consciousness that Christ was standing there, no doubt. I remember that I then leaned back and thought: if the living Christ is standing here, then this is the risen Christ. This means that I know for sure and personally, within the limits of my personal, own experience, that Christ has risen and, therefore, everything that is said about Him is true. This is the same kind of logic as that of the early Christians, who discovered Christ and gained faith not by telling what was from the beginning, but by meeting the living Christ, from which it followed that the crucified Christ was what is said about Him, and that the whole preceding story also has meaning.

     Well, then I read; But this was something completely different. I now remember my first discoveries in this field very vividly; I probably would have expressed it differently when I was a boy of about fifteen, but the first thing was: that if it was true, then the whole Gospel was true, that there was meaning in life, that it was possible to spend no more than to share with others the miracle that I had discovered; that there are probably thousands of people who do not know about this, and that they should be told as soon as possible. The second is that if this is true, then everything I thought about people was not true; that God created everyone; that He loved everyone unto death; and that therefore, even if they think that they are my enemies, I know that they are not my enemies. I remember that the next morning I went out and walked as if in a transformed world; I looked at every person I came across and thought: God created you out of love! He loves you! you are my brother, you are my sister; You can destroy me, because you don't understand it, but I know it, and that's enough... This was the most striking discovery.

     Further, as I continued to read, I was struck by God's respect and care for man; if people are ready to trample each other in the mud, then God never does it. In the story, for example, about the prodigal son: the prodigal son admits that he has sinned before heaven, before his father, that he is not worthy to be his son; He is even ready to say: accept me as a mercenary... But if you have noticed, in the Gospel the father does not allow him to say this last phrase, he allows him to finish to "I am not worthy to be called your son" and then interrupts him, returning him back to the family: bring shoes, bring a ring, bring clothes... For you can be an unworthy son, a worthy servant or a slave, in no way; sonship is not withdrawn. This is the third thing.