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Anyone who will google "Sergei Roy" on their computer will find quite a wide variety of material that I have written over the years, ranging from translations of poetry by Vladimir Vysotsky, Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, and numerous other Russian poets, to a long series of articles on politics and similar issues that have appeared in newspapers and magazines and on various sites.

Whenever I thus use Google myself as I look for comments on my writings or for any other reason, including common-or-garden vanity, I cannot but feel sorry that there is so much of my stuff that is no longer available to readers, often even to myself unless I wish to spend endless hours rummaging through mounds of yellowed paper - with little hope of success.

Indeed, I have written for a variety of publications whose list reads like a series of obituaries: Moscow Magazine (defunct, reborn, defunct again), Moscow Tribune (defunct), Moscow Guardian (defunct), Capital Perspective (defunct), and a few others, including the webzine www.intelligent.ru (defunct) which I edited and in which a lot of my stuff appeared. Most notably, I ran The Moscow News for ten years and published in it copiously, but its archives are in a deplorable state - hardly anything that, say, an historian can work with. What would you - these have been the times of change, that well-known Chinese curse, and the changes have been swift and implacable, with many things that are more important than publications or archives falling by the wayside.

Among other things, this inaccessibility of past writing is inconvenient in that, whenever I wish to cite some of my earlier work, referencing it is an insurmountable problem. I can't very well say "I told you so" whenever one of my prophesies proves correct (as they sometimes do). For where can one look up that prophesy? Reference please.

Then again, the few books that I have published are out of print, and there is hardly any hope of further editions. Not to mention the fact that some of them have never seen light or are ever likely to, given my unique flair for marketing my oeuvre.

All this should explain how grateful I am to my boss, Dmitry Babkin, for his readiness to offer me a chance to set up "Sergei Roy's Archive" as a section of the www.guardian-psj.ru site. Here I hope to present as much of the aforementioned oeuvre as I will be able to recover from my current hard disk, old diskettes, back numbers of newspapers and magazines, books, manuscripts, and whatever else I can lay my hands on.

The amount of work that will have to be done is daunting to say the least, and I am not too sure I will be able to complete the job in the few years that are left me. Well, they can't shoot me for trying, can they.

The list of what I propose to offer here should include

- Articles, mostly on politics, written between, say, 1993 and the present;

- "Collapse of the Colossus" - a series of essays on events, mostly political, in Russia between 1985 and 1991, originally published on a weekly basis in Moscow News between 1995 and 2004, with an interruption of a year or two for heart surgery;

- "Apology for the Russian Intelligentsia," a monograph in two parts - in Russian; unpublished;

- "Taiga Law," a tale of adventure, published in English and Russian in 2002;    

- a number of short stories, some published in a variety of newspapers and magazines, others as yet unpublished; in Russian and English; some are also available in German, but I am not sure they should figure here;

- a series of travelogues - accounts of my hikes, mostly solo, through the wilder parts of Russia; 

- "Solo on the Aral," a novel of adventure published in 2007 by Evrasia+; in Russian;

- "The Cruise Beyond Yonder," another novel of adventure, as yet unpublished; in Russian;

- "Notes of an Amateur Shooter," in Russian; unpublished;

- some of my English translations of Russian poets' work, the better ones; originally I also planned to include my translations of prosaic and scholarly texts, but that would be too time-consuming and hardly worth the effort; well, we will see;

- book reviews.

There are certain to be some changes to these plans as I go along, but the main thing right now is to get started. So, as we Russians say, S Bogom! (God be with us!).

Moscow

April 8, 2009