After the wedding with her grandfather, they came to Russia. Later, my grandfather served in the East, and my mother was then in Smolny and came on vacation to my parents (six days by train from St. Petersburg to the Persian border, and then on horseback to Erzurum), where she met my father, who was a dragoman, that is, in Russian, an interpreter at the embassy. Then my grandfather finished his term of service, and, as I said, they went to Switzerland – my mother was already married to my father. And then there was the war, and my grandmother's first son died in the war; then, in 1915, Sasha, the composer, died; by that time we ourselves – my parents and I, with my grandmother – had come to Persia (my father had been assigned there). My grandmother was always in tow, she was passive, very passive.

     And the mother was, apparently, very intense?

     She was not intense, she was energetic, courageous. For example, she rode with her father all over the mountains, rode well, played tennis, hunted wild boar and tiger – all this she could do. Another thing is that she was not at all prepared for the émigré life, but she knew French, knew Russian, knew German, knew English, and this, of course, saved her, because when we came to the West, the time was bad – 1921 and unemployment, but nevertheless, with knowledge of the language it was possible to get something; Then she learned to knock on a typewriter, learned shorthand and worked all her life.

     How my father's ancestors came to Russia is not clear to me; I know that in the time of Peter the Great they came from Northern Scotland to Russia, and settled there. My paternal grandfather was still in correspondence with a cousin who lived in the northwest Western Highlands; She was already an old woman, lived alone, in complete solitude, far from everything, and, apparently, was a courageous old woman. The only anecdote I know about her is from a letter in which she told her grandfather that she had heard someone climbing up the wall at night; She looked and saw a thief climbing up the drainpipe to the second floor, took an axe, waited for him to take hold of the windowsill, cut off his hands, closed the window, and went to bed. And she described all this in such a natural tone - they say, this is what troubles can be when you live alone. What struck me most was that she could close the window and go to bed; The rest is his business.

     They lived in Moscow, my grandfather was a doctor, and my father studied at home with two brothers and a sister; and my grandfather demanded that they speak Russian for half a day, because naturally it was the local dialect; and the other half a day – one day in Latin, another day in Greek in addition to Russian and one foreign language that had to be learned for the matriculation certificate – this is at home. Then he entered the mathematics department, graduated, and from there he went to the school of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the diplomatic school, where Oriental languages and what was needed for the diplomatic service were studied.

     His father began to travel to the East early; as a seventeen-eighteen-year-old youth, he traveled to the East in the summer, during vacations, on horseback alone through all of Russia, Turkey - this was considered useful. I know nothing about his brothers, they are both dead; One was shot, the other died, I think, of appendicitis. And my sister was married in Moscow to one of the early Bolsheviks; but I do not know what has become of her, and I cannot remember her name; I remembered it for a long time, but now I can't remember. Suddenly it would turn out that someone else exists: I have no one on my father's side...

     My grandmother on my father's side was my godmother; She was not present at the christening, only "registered". In general, I think it was not taken very seriously, judging by the fact that none of my people ever went to church before I later began to go and "lead" them; My father began to go before me, but it was much later, after the revolution, in the late twenties and early thirties.

     In Lausanne in 1961, I met a priest who baptized me. It was a very funny meeting, because I went there as a young bishop (young by consecration), met him, and said, "Father Constantine, I'm so glad to see you again!" I said: "Father Constantine! Shame on you, we've known each other for years – and you don't recognize me?!" – "No, I'm sorry, I don't recognize me..." – "Why, you baptized me,," Well, he got very excited, called his parishioners who were there: look, he said, I baptized a bishop.. And the next Sunday I was in his church, in the middle of the church there was a book where baptisms are recorded, he showed me, he said: "What does it mean, I baptized you as Andrei – why are you Anthony now?" And then he served and read the Gospel in Russian, and I didn't find out that it was Russian... We spoke in French, he served in Greek, and he read the Gospel in my honor in Russian language – it's good that someone told me: did you notice how he tried to please you, how wonderfully he reads Russian?.. Well, I thanked him cautiously.

     For two months after my birth, we lived with my parents in Lausanne, and then returned to Russia. At first we lived in Moscow, in the present Scriabin Museum, and in 1915-1916 my father was again assigned to the East, and we left for Persia. And there I spent the second part of my relatively early childhood, up to the age of seven.

     I have no clear memories of Persia, only fragmentary ones. For example, I can see a number of places with my eyes now, but I could not tell where these places are. For example, I see a large city gate; it may be Tehran, maybe Tabriz, or maybe not; for some reason it seems to me that this is Tehran or Tabriz. Then we traveled a lot, lived in about ten different places.

     Then I have a memory (I think I was five or six years old) of how we settled not far from Tehran, I think, in a mansion surrounded by a large garden. We went to see him. It was quite a big house, the whole garden was overgrown and dry, and I remember walking and dragging my feet through the dry grass, because I liked the crackle of that dry grass.

     I remember that I had my own ram and my own dog; The dog was torn apart by other, street dogs, and the ram was torn apart by someone's dog, so it was all very tragic. The ram had peculiar habits: every morning he came to the living room, took flowers out of all the vases with his teeth and did not eat them, but put them on the table next to the vase and then lay down in an armchair, from which he was mostly expelled; That is, at one time they were always expelled, but with more or less indignation. Gradually, you know, everything becomes a habit; The first time there was great indignation, and then just another event: we need to drive the sheep and throw it out...

     There was a donkey who, like all donkeys, was stubborn. And in order to ride it, first of all, we had to hunt, because we had a large park, and the donkey, of course, preferred to graze in the park, and not to perform his donkey duties. And we went out in a whole group, crawled between the trees, surrounded the animal, one frightened it from one side, it rushed to the other, pounced on it, and finally, after an hour or an hour and a half of such a lively hunt, the donkey was caught and saddled. But it did not end there, for he had learned that if he fell to the ground and began to roll on his back before the saddle was placed on him, it would be much more difficult to saddle him. The local Persians weaned him from this by attaching a Persian wooden saddle to him instead of a Russian Cossack saddle, and the first time he fell down and fell on his back, he instantly took off with a howl, because it was painful. But it didn't end there, because he had a principle: if you want one thing from him, then you have to do another, and so if you wanted him to move somewhere, you had to deceive him, as if you wanted him not to go. And the best way was to sit real high on the Persian saddle, catch the donkey by the tail and pull it back, and then it would go fast forward. Here is a memory.

     I also have a memory of the first railway. There was one railway for the whole of Persia, about fifteen kilometers long, between either Tehran or Tabriz and a place called Kermanshah and revered (I don't remember why) a place of pilgrimage. And everything was going great when we drove from Kermanshah to the city, because the road went downhill. But when the train was going to pull up, it would come to the bridge, the one with the hump, and then all the men would get out, and the whites, the Europeans, the nobles, would walk beside the train, and the less noble men would push. And when it was pushed through this hump, it was possible to get back on the train and even get there very safely, which was, in general, very entertaining and a great event: well, think about it – fifteen kilometers of railway!