About the book: year / This story, written during the era of Perestroika, strangely did not appeal to our literary perestroikaists. They all unanimously, unanimously, branded me and my story with disgrace. Moreover, the reasons for such a harsh attitude, as the cat Behemoth said, were all astonishingly more surprising than the other. For example: the city prison could not be located on the street named after Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, just as the garrison guardhouse could not be located on the street named after Chernyshevsky. Since such profound and meaningful coincidences cannot exist in real life, it follows that the plot suffers from convention and schematism. The fact that one of the negative characters in the story is Jewish is, naturally, anti-Semitism. The fact that one of the characters in the story’s mother ended up in the West because she married an American is an obvious misunderstanding: the author simply did not know or forgot that at the time being described, marriages between Soviet citizens and representatives of capitalist powers were prohibited... Of course, all this nonsense that I, the author, dismiss with contempt and disgust. Everything in my story is true. Everything was exactly as I described, and shouldn’t I, the author, know about it. But what was actually meant was something completely, completely different, and not what I was reproached with out loud. Something very important for those who find fault - but I still don’t understand what. And I don’t want to understand. Then my story received approval from the Famous Lithuanian. He said that the story made a strong impression on him, and urged him not to pay attention to the ridicule. He was never able to help me, although he tried. It was then that he himself was persecuted: he was excommunicated from all posts of union importance without exception and ordered to sit in his Lithuania and not rock the boat. For many years I put my story in a desk drawer and completely forgot about it. And only now I remembered. Be that as it may, it is to the Famous Lithuanian that I dedicate my “Guardhouse”. Polubotko V.Yu.