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Introduction
He who has ears to hear, let him hear, he who has eyes, let him see
Remission
The start of the end…
House of sorrow…
Depression
Madhouse
The only reason is love…
What to do?
Out of the frying pan and into the fire…
Teacher
Group
What fills my soul…
Primal fear
Labour, all overlabour
Life and death
Transformation…
Regress
Progress
I started to write this book a very long time ago, when the disease was actively oppressing me. I wanted very much to be heard, even more to be understood. Horrible things happen in the realm of tormenting dreams, as I called the place where I come from, the place where suffering and pain, injustice and despair rule, the place of unrealized hopes, evil and unceasing sorrow. The torments of life in this country can be felt by many, if not everyone. To fall into the trap of spiritual dreams and to become lonely – what could be more evil? The brand of madness frightened the brightest minds more than anything else. “No, it’s easier with a stick and a bag, no, it’s easier to work and starve,” as Pushkin thought. And undoubtedly, I would have to stay within the borders of this gloomy country, if there was no such wonderful person who showed me the way of hard labor and diligence, by which one can become strong and overcome the horrors of madness.
I just finished the first university year and, unfortunately, could no longer continue my studies: its cost abruptly rose, and many students, and me too, were transferred to other educational institutions. This, of course, was a shock, and I remember its wave effect in my soul: suddenly at the moment of farewell, I turned from my closed, quiet, broken somewhere inside, almost constantly dull state, hidden from my friends as much as possible, into a person I had dreamed to be being a student – vigil, easily communicating, self-confident and interesting. These are persons who usually is loved and respected by young people, the persons who are vigil and active. But I lost the world for which all this enthusiasm was expected, and in general, instead of even greater sadness and sorrow at the time of leaving, I rejoiced, on the contrary, showing no sign of my failure to others, as if a happy event occurred to me, thus shining with joy. May be this is the right way?, you may ask. But here’s the point: this euphoria was an inflated, sick mental state, a part of the incoming sorrow of an incredible scale. At that time I have spent the entire limit of tolerance to horrible feelings and was already being destroyed from within, losing control, falling into the abyss of a sorrow that is the worst for a human – the horror of madness. And this leap of mood was the first effective phenomenon, a change in the attitude towards the reality, a harbinger of the disease inception. Filled with this wave of strange idleness, I rushed into another university, having passed the entrance exams, but found myself to have weak erudition, since maniacal exultations strongly weaken attention, the necessary memory properties and assiduity. But somehow, by the power of my new charm, which, as I realized, make proud all the patients with such a disorder, I managed to enter the next year in another university, while my mood was beginning to take on already dashing forms of a real disease.
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These teenagers, to whom I sincerely became attached, began to notice in me something odd because sometimes I gave out my thoughts aloud. “Vasya’s gone crazy”, one of my friends told me, totally sure, in his turn, of my adequacy. I was then busy with the opening the mind’s eye and a similar remark, as I still recall it in my memory, but at that time decided to dissuade others from such a mostly evil assessment of my temperament. But more and more I heard remarks about my insanity, and the girl I was in love with at that time told me, unable to withstand the passions, that everybody mocked at me. They made such assessment not at once; I can say for sure that many people, especially close friends, were for some time undoubtedly convinced that I am a real god, including that girl whose grandmother told my granny that her granddaughter proudly asserted that Serge is a god, and probably she was very pleased that love affairs took place with such an important person. I must say, the fact that I considered myself a god, did not at all controverted the necessary idea of my normality for people who loved me. So unusual were my relations with a huge number of my friends; for almost every work assignment connected with a fairly large farm, I brought with me a whole crowd of teenagers, motivating them with a kind of special power of my inner magnetism, and the kids did the hard work for free to help his so dearly beloved friend. There were cases when over twenty people appeared in the garden fields, and everyone was stimulated by the altruism of the other and, of course, by my special attention, which helped them to feel, I think, happier, and the work seemed to them a fun game. These “walks to Vasya’s garden”, repeated for many years and became a common thing. The nature of this phenomenon was in many respects a mystery to me, and the arisen idea of deification could become an “idée fixe” in such conditions, now the great organizer (in the opinion of many people) Vasya could have really be once that Krishna-boy, who cheerfully had led forward the children of his village in the pictures of Bhagavad Gita. And even after growing up to twenty years old, many of them, even the most stable and intelligent of my comrades, believed that they were friends of a real god. Some day I remembered, being already in deep depression, this suggestion to my friend’s mind, when Vovka expressed quite repulsive sarcasm in my direction, and he began to justify himself, saying: “We believed you,” thus dexterously hiding from the truth, which was the fact that, as I thought, his own maniacal attitudes were in full harmony with mine, and their union made my idea common, as also for Dimon, but these two comrades were smarter and more sober than many of the local guys and yet they got dexterously deceived.
These kinds of ideas were already believed from those books of the magician Castaneda, being in love with whom, we dreamed to go in our entire company to Mexico and find there the teacher of magic called Don Juan. This idea is evidently not much crazier than the one I was infected with, but we were all very much attached to each other, sharing the most secret thoughts and hidden dreams, undoubtedly merging in our search and reasoning into a unity, where the idea of one person could immediately become the idea of another without the intervention of any criticism, or for the sake of that other person, especially due to my deification, which assumed an important role for my great destiny and my friends. And they all believed almost out of habit, because I often took a leading position in relations with friends, who gathered in crowds in the garden to help in hard work, and heard from them no complaints, forcing them to believe that it was the best way to spend time. And if your belief is shared, it has a much greater chance of continuing to exist, and I must say that the guy who woke up the first suspicions of my madness was not from our company. And when a man is already called mad by the community, this makes him a stranger to everyone, because if you do not show your difference in comparison with the sick person, joining the almost direct condemnation, then you are treated like him, and many of them did so, at once forgetting their recent respect as a terrible mistake in their life. Like Pushkin’s: “But truth is: be my mind not clear, a plague will merit as much fear.”
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