My Diary. Part 9: Travel Notes - Great Britain (Великобритания)

My memory and native language tightly connect me with Russia - the source of my cultural and ethnic patriotism, because we are all Russians and nobody and nothing can convert us into Brits, Germans or Swedes. The Russian land always stood, stands and will stand on it. I was not going to remain permanently overseas. But as soon as I had crossed the border the cruel circumstances dictated their will and I had to stand up firmly to survive. Many years later, however, I still remember, so clearly as if it happened yesterday, that sunny and a bit warm November day in German Spremberg as the main milestone of my fate. There were already behind forced Oder, imprisonment in German strafanstalt and unexpected freedom when I had been output beyond the camp and said "Lebe wohl!". If I were escorted back to Russia, it would perhaps only extend my vague uncertainty and internal instability between the past, with its cute, but naive blown away in the misty haze of memories hopes of a young historian in the chaotic time of the Great changes in his own country, and an uncertain future, therefore so attractive and enticing. But not by malicious intent, but by the random and unusual to Germans negligence, or perhaps because of rumours, that I deliberately dissolved in the prison, of my repentance, homesickness and unbearable and indescribable desire to go back as soon as possible, I appeared on that very day at the crossroads between the countries, in a literal sense: if the first coach from Berlin was not going to Paris but, say, to Stockholm, I would have ended up in Sweden. But I landed in France, then in Holland and after all in England. Uncharted horizons and hazy distances beckon us forward toward the wanderings and adventures. Anyway, the next part of my long story comes to United Kingdom as a logical continuation of my tramping across Europe. See this blog on http://blogs.mail.ru/mail/postworld/38D7EF7E11C6A84.html

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