I never learned to fall in love with this country as a land. For twenty years that I lived here, America has always remained a notion. At times, like one in an unhappy marriage, I am inclined to jolt and escape form thiis notion, but more often (due to the lack of a destination), I exercise resigned acceptance. Its people and their habits, its geographical landscape, its smells – to this day plunge me into a dreamlike trance and the genre of that dream is mild horror. Everything here remains foreign, save for the sound – the English language, but since language to me is just an inadequate tool through which speaks the soul, it is not a strong enough reason to consider America home.
       Neither have I ever felt myself an immigrant here and hence I do not have the psychological make-up of one who feels obliged to sing grateful hymns to his/her host for being able to earn daily bread. Besides, as they used to believe in the country of my birth, we do not live by bread alone. Those that still believe this now-outdated notion find America inappropriate. That is why the best of American literary minds became expatriates in the 20th century when America was on the way to becoming what it is today. The only country which had a possibility to live “not by bread alone”, the ex-Soviet Union, had proclaimed it a cruel illusion and missed its chance at preserving a human face. 
       If the above idea is an illusion (declared so because it has thus far proved to be unrealizable), then, its opposite, represented by America, is an outright lie. Those writers, philosophers, poets who call for the annihilation of this illusion act as simpletons who prefer one form of injustice over another only because it is more easily maintained. They have no ability to look forward or upward – just downward, at their own two feet, which click and shake to the rhythm of the reigning social order. They are not disappointed pessimists in the philosophical sense of the word; they are psychological losers who sweat fearfully in the face of a spiritual challenge. For them, America is home and an example to be followed and borrowed.
       As for me, I remain true to the illusion, and I believe that we were not designed to travel only those roads that already been paved and polished. Rather than borrowing from America as a whole, I will borrow from a single American, the poet Robert Frost, and “take the road not travelled by” being fully aware that it might lead to disappointment or worse – failure.