Unframed

I have a vivid memory, clear as 4K video. I am four years old. I am lying on the warm parquet floor. The apartment is usually noisy—phones ringing, adults arguing about high culture or low salaries, the constant hum of the Soviet intelligentsia trying to survive.

But in this moment, there is silence. I am drawing.

The parquet was warm. The sun was coming through the tall windows—those two-meter Stalinist windows designed to make you feel small and the State feel eternal. But I didn't feel small. I felt infinite. The pencil moved across the paper, and the world appeared. Not the world as it was given to me by adults, by teachers, by the System. The world as I decided it should be.

My mother walked past and smiled. She didn't interrupt. She just kept walking. My grandfather, a Colonel of the Interior Ministry, didn't scold me for blocking the hallway. He stepped over me carefully, like I was a sacred object that shouldn't be disturbed.

The true legacy of the family wasn't found in plaster or marble scattered on the floor. It was in the paper. Walls were lined with encyclopedias. This library became the graveyard of my childish beliefs. I had access to two distinct versions of reality, sitting side by side on those shelves.

On the left: Brockhaus and Efron, the pre-revolutionary encyclopedia. Thick, leather-bound volumes printed before 1917. The world of the Tsar, gold, aesthetics, and God.

On the right: The Great Soviet Encyclopedia. Red spines. The world of the Party, concrete, quotas, and Dialectical Materialism.

I invented a game. I would open them to the same letter. I would compare the definitions. It was my first experience with how history is edited in real time. Take the word "Merchant". In Brockhaus, he was a pillar of society. In the Soviet edition, he was a class enemy. Same word. Two different truths.

I was seven years old, sitting on the parquet floor, surrounded by the intellectual debris of two dead empires, learning the most important skill of my life: how to read between the lines.