About the book: 1967 / This book is about youth... Youth contains almost everything that human life contains in general: love, separation, the search for goals and deeds, hobbies and disappointments, confusion and happiness... But youth reveals this, the rest of life repeats, polishes, clarifies, changes. Youth involuntarily conceals within itself an amazing, furious power: the power of discovery. The world appears before youth again - and the colors of the world are bright and not blurred in the morning. This book talks about what is forever associated with youth, about what is old and new, like life itself: about the first love, the first misfortune, the first feat and the first attempt to comprehend one’s being and the meaning of one’s present and future. Youth, like everything beautiful in the world, does not last long. It breaks off almost invisibly, and you yourself no longer noticed that you have accumulated and are carrying a kind of cargo, which is boringly called “life experience.” And you build your destiny or hack it if it turned out wrong, already endowed with human experience: experience not only only actions, but also reflections, the experience of life and thoughts. The first insomnia comes to you, and in the morning you get up and continue life, you go from the dawn country of Youth to another, more severe and vast country, which is called Maturity. This book includes stories that I wrote a long time ago and, perhaps, are already known to you, and others written much later. Vladimir Amlinsky