| P E R S O N A L P U R G A T O R Y |
From 1998 to 2004, Jurii remembers those years as a time of total solitude and isolation. Once the family moved into their Château and he began frequently changing schools, he lost contact with all his old friends and made no real effort to find new ones.
During that period he could go entire days without speaking a single word, fully immersed in himself. His typical day unfolded as follows: Jurii would wake up, go to school, sit at the furthest desk, and spend the lessons drawing in his notebook, as if he is not even there. Then he would leave for music school, where he expressed his thoughts and emotions through music. Upon returning home, he would lock himself in his room and continue his creative work. During these years Jurii drew a great many comics. He could fill an entire notebook with plots in a single day, only to never open it again. He did not create for the public… he created for the pure pleasure of the act of creation itself.
In his mind, Jurii built entire worlds. He invented hundreds of characters, each with their own intricate plots and biographies. Curiously, he never called these drawings comics, for in his childhood he had hardly read any and did not particularly favour the genre. Instead, he regarded them as film scripts or detailed storyboards for the movies he would one day direct. It was during these years that Jurii realised he was a truly creative being and that he wished to devote his entire life to art… above all, to making films and becoming a movie director.
Only many years later did he understand how profoundly these solitary passions had distanced him from other children of his age. And if Jurii had any friends at all, they were proxy-friends… more precisely, the friends of his elder brother Evgeny. Jurii had never even met most of those lads, yet Evgeny would return from parties and recount stories about what had happened with his friends. Jurii absorbed these tales as though he himself had been present at those gatherings, as though his brother’s friends were also his own. In his mind he endowed them with various qualities and began drawing comics about them, although in reality those people did not even know that Jurii existed.
In 1999, Jurii received his first personal computer and access to the internet. This further deepened his solitude, for he began to find genuine joy in virtual worlds and there discovered many anonymous friends, thereby replacing real human interaction. Those were the golden years of the internet… before social networks and pervasive state surveillance, a time of complete freedom of expression, creativity, and the unhindered search for information, untouched by artificial intelligence.
Jurii was truly happy in that old net. He quickly mastered coding and basic programming, which allowed him to enter the circle of hacker groups Razor 1911 and Skid Row, and even attain a certain respected status among the hackers of that era. Jurii always operated anonymously, using only a nickname that will not be mentioned here, for the simple reason that these groups engaged in activities that were not entirely legal. They were the pirates of the early internet.
Being a child, Jurii was not particularly interested in stealing data or cracking software. What fascinated him above all were video games and the possibility of playing them for free… ideally before their official release. He recalls having many famous titles installed on his computer long before they appeared on the market, thanks to his connections in the hacking scene. His classmates, who also wanted to play them, never believed Jurii when he said he already had the games and called him a liar… until he brought them a copy on a hand-burned CD. Pirated compact discs were everywhere. They contained music, films, video games, photographs, programs… an entire universe of data. Files were even passed around on floppy disks, carefully compressed and split into parts. It was a whole pirate culture and philosophy that Jurii supports to this day. He has never paid for any music, films, software… or, needless to say, pornography… completely rejecting the very concept of copyright and openly speaking out against it.
In those hacker circles, Jurii had the opportunity to communicate with major programmers and developers. Even then he understood that real programmers received mere pennies, while all copyright belonged to giant corporations that made millions from their work. The same story applied to musicians, whose rights belonged to record labels, to filmmakers, and to every sphere where copyright existed. Jurii has nothing against an author being paid for his labour, but only if the money goes directly into the author’s own hands, and not through intermediaries.
To avoid empty words regarding his views on piracy, Jurii has always made all of his own projects freely available on the internet. And for those works that could not be released for free due to contractual obligations but were nevertheless pirated and uploaded online, Jurii never complained to his partners and certainly never asked the pirates to remove them. On the contrary, he considers this the highest possible compliment an author can receive. For if a person is willing to go through so much trouble of hacking systems simply to experience a creative work, then that work must truly be worth it.
The hacker mentality that Jurii developed would accompany him throughout his entire life. He understood that any system created by humans could therefore be broken, bypassed, or rewritten. And when he spoke of any system, he truly meant *any* system… from the smallest mechanical lock to the laws of entire states.
During those years, Jurii mastered the program Macromedia Flash, with which he began transforming his drawings and comics into computer animations that he published on various online portals. These were perhaps the first of his works presented to a wider audience.
But unfortunately, these golden years of internet solitude for Jurii soon came to an end. It all began back in 1997, when he broke his left foot. His already unusual organism fused the bones incorrectly, leaving the foot severely deformed. To correct this, surgery was required. However, the option proposed by the doctors was completely unacceptable to Jurii. Every surgeon who examined his foot claimed they could easily perform the operation, but their solution was to disassemble the foot and fix it in such a way that the foot would remain completely immobile forever. It would be straight and aesthetically pleasing… but like a poker… motionless. Jurii could not understand why they could not perform the surgery in a way that preserved mobility. The doctors replied that it was impossible. Jurii, who possessed an excellent knowledge of human anatomy, went home with his mother and together they drew all the bones, all the diagrams and schemes, showing how such an operation could be performed, taking into account the specific nature of his foot and the fractures. At the same time, his father… an engineer… added his own technical insights. Thus, the entire Kirnev family developed a new medical concept for the operation.
When they presented their proposed method to the doctors, the surgeons refused, stating that they could not perform such a work because it did not comply with accepted medical protocols. Jurii categorically rejected any other option. It would be done according to their plan, or not at all.
In 2002, a professional surgeon was finally found who agreed to perform the operation according to their drawings. His name was Dr. Valery Umnov from Saint Petersburg. Upon seeing the schemes, he immediately declared them brilliant. And, looking ahead, I can say that he successfully carried out the surgery and later received awards and even wrote a dissertation thanks to this operation and those very blueprints. Jurii’s leg was once again straight and beautiful… and, most importantly, it remained fully mobile.
Before the operation could begin, a great many medical analyses and paperwork had to be completed. Although Dr. Umnov was an outstanding master surgeon, as a man he was extraordinarily greedy. Upon learning that the Kirnev family came from abroad, he immediately began demanding large sums of money. But if Nadezhda had refused to pay even a single coin to the various teachers who crossed Jurii’s path, she was certainly not going to pay for an operation that was supposed to be free by law. The problem was that Jurii had lived in Hungary since birth and had no valid Russian medical documents concerning his disability. When they began the paperwork at the age of thirteen, the law now classified it not as a childhood disability, but as one acquired later in life. This required an extremely long and complicated bureaucratic process.
The Kirnev family owned an apartment in Saint Petersburg, yet they had never lived in it. The building had been constructed in the early 1990s, and the flat remained an unfinished concrete shell all those years… bare walls, bare floors, with nothing but exposed wires protruding where electrical sockets should have been. It was into this isolated concrete box that thirteen-year-old Jurii was placed. He calls that liminal apartment his personal purgatory.
For months he barely left those rooms. Every morning his mother would rise at dawn to join endless queues in the Russian bureaucracy, fighting for Jurii’s documents. Thus, each of his days unfolded in the same manner: he would wake up after she had already left, finding breakfast and lunch waiting for him on the kitchen table, long since gone cold. Jurii would sit alone with himself, gazing out of the window, drawing pictures in his notebooks in complete silence. Late in the evening his exhausted mother would return and tell him about her day. Then they would go to sleep. And so it repeated, day after day.
Sometimes, on her way, she would bring him a book or a magazine, which Jurii would devour in a single day. The magazines often contained simple children’s puzzles… labyrinths or “spot the ten differences” pictures. Trapped in this isolation, Jurii trained his mind so intensely that he learned to solve the labyrinths from memory in mere seconds. A single glance was enough for him to trace the correct path in his head without error. With the “spot the differences” pictures, thanks to microscopic flaws in cheap newspaper printing, he could find not ten, but fifty differences or more. He was ready to occupy his mind with anything, if only to keep from going mad in that suffocating silence and solitude.
Some days Jurii remembers standing at the window for hours, counting cars: how many red ones drove to the left, how many white ones to the right. Time behaved in the strangest manner. He could glance out, count only five cars, and then look at the clock to discover that two hours had passed. Or conversely, he might count more than fifty, only to realise that barely five minutes had gone by. Outside the window there was nothing but Soviet-era Russian apartment blocks and a road. Everything was grey and colorless. Jurii looked at those rows of windows and kept asking the same question: How many other isolated children were out there, just like him, standing by their windows at that very moment and looking back in his direction? The answer — all of them.
Once a week Jurii had visitors. His mother would bring doctors who took blood samples and ran tests. They stayed no more than twenty minutes, arriving with special portable cases containing their instruments. Then they would leave, and Jurii would once again remain alone.
When all the necessary documents were finally gathered, the time came to prepare for the operation itself, and for this Jurii was placed in hospital. It was the Turner National Medical Research Center for Pediatric Traumatology and Orthopedics. Before continuing, it is worth explaining what kind of institution this was. The walls of the building had been erected back in Tsarist times. According to some accounts, it was one of the oldest pediatric orthopedic facilities in Russia, yet this status brought no honour… for no repairs had been carried out since. Crumbling, peeling walls, constantly flickering lights, not a single functional wheelchair, rusted and broken medical instruments, the stench of mould and decay, and embittered nurses who hated you and served the most repulsive-looking porridge. In short, all the banal horror clichés that Hollywood uses to frighten audiences in its thrillers. They think it is scary. For Jurii, it was simply his childhood… a happy one. He had grown up inside a horror film.
Without exaggeration, in several large departments of the hospital there was only one single wheelchair. And even that had only one wheel that actually turned, emitting a terrible screech that echoed throughout the building whenever someone was being transported after surgery.
At the same time, one must speak of the other patients. All the patients were children. Many, like Jurii, came from ordinary families. Yet the absolute majority were disabled orphans brought from all over Russia, treated as if they were attending some grim medical summer camp. This added certain dark shades and pinches of horror to the already described setting, because these children were subjected to real medical experiments. The doctors used them to defend their dissertations and develop new treatment methods. And since every operation (especially a questionable one) required the signature of parents or guardians, in the case of orphans such signatures were not needed. If the operation was successful, everyone was pleased… the child had been helped. Enjoy! If it failed… well, gravediggers ask no questions.
Jurii was actually happy to find himself in that grim hospital ward… at least it meant leaving behind that suffocating isolation and gaining some human contact. There he found himself among a large group of boys aged eleven to seventeen with various conditions: some limped, some suffered from cerebral palsy, others had full amputations.
Only later did Jurii realise that this was the first time in his life he was communicating with real Russian children. Up until then, whenever he had met Russian-speaking children in Hungary, they had not been typical Russian youngsters. Most of them came from diplomatic families and had therefore been exposed, at least to some extent, to intellectual and cultured circles. Now, however, Jurii found himself confronted by the stark cultural divide between himself and many of his peers in this new environment. Very quickly he understood that, despite speaking the same language, he did not understand them at all. There existed a whole layer of speech he had never encountered… criminal jargon, regional slang, and the romanticised bandit culture that had lingered from the turbulent 1990s. These children treated the hospital like a prison, building their own strict hierarchy: some were “pakhans” (bosses), others “shestyorki” (errand boys). The hierarchy was divided between those who could walk and those who could not. The walkers were further split into the fast and the slow, while the non-walkers were divided into those who could sit and those who lay permanently in bed. Thus, Jurii had to learn new, previously unknown rules of Russian hospitals and prisons.
The main currency in the hospital was batteries for portable players. The most sacred and untouchable assets, kept only for the most extreme situations, were rechargeable batteries. People were ready to fight to the death over them. The most common currency, however, was cigarettes. The children were smart enough not to smoke them, but to collect and trade them, exchanging with local homeless people for favours or goods. I will not describe the trade in pills there, but one can easily imagine the system.
Every evening the boys in the ward would push their beds together and organise gambling games with cards. They played “Durak” (the fool), and every game began with a careful count to ensure there were exactly thirty-six cards. After each round they would count them again, because these children, despite their crooked fingers and cards constantly slipping from their hands, still managed to perform the most incredible sleights of hand, hiding aces up their sleeves. It was there that Jurii was taught some card tricks and methods of cheating. From that time onward he almost never played cards again, for he understood: if a disabled boy with numb fingers could perform such feats, then with healthy hands one could deceive anyone.
Many of those boys, being orphans under the care of local churches, had been thoroughly indoctrinated. They often spoke among themselves on religious matters. Jurii remembers one event that forever severed him from any form of religious fanaticism.
Each of the boys had a small personal box or wallet in which he kept his most treasured possessions. One day, one of them took out his wallet and began proudly showing his collection. There were stickers, inserts from chewing gum, and cut-outs from magazines… mostly cool cars, funny stickers and movie stars. Jurii recalls how the boy took out a picture with a Ferrari car. All the lads looked and said: “Wow, what a cool car!” Then came a photograph of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Everyone agreed: “What a great actor!” Next appeared the bare breasts of Pamela Anderson. Great. And then, as he continued flipping through the cards, a small Orthodox icon appeared… a bearded man rendered in traditional religious style. At the sight of it, a primal fear flashed in the eyes of all the boys. Their throats tightened, and an uncomfortable, heavy silence fell over the room. Jurii looked at them and could not understand why this little picture had frightened them so deeply. The boys stared at it for a moment, crossed themselves, the owner kissed the icon reverently, put it back in his wallet, and they continued flipping through the pictures as if nothing had happened… cars, actors, tits and all.
It was then that Jurii thought: if religion is fear, then he wanted nothing to do with it.
And then came the operation day. It took place on the hottest day of the summer, when breathing itself felt impossible and the hospital had no cooling systems whatsoever. All the subsequent post-operative days remained just as scorching and unbearable. The surgery lasted more than six hours. Jurii remembers waking up briefly during the procedure. For about twenty seconds the anaesthetists managed to put him back under. In that fleeting moment he saw the process: his leg cut open to the bone. After the operation, the doctors even presented him with a small piece of his own sawn-off bone as a souvenir.
According to the doctors, Jurii was supposed to experience the most terrible, unbearable pain. They constantly gave him painkillers, but after taking them for just one day he refused any further medication… they made him feel worse than the pain itself. The pain he could endure, no matter how severe it was.
After a week in the intensive care unit, spent in absolute silence, Jurii was returned to the general ward. There religion continued to reach out with its tentacles from various directions into Jurii’s life. He was encased in a massive plaster cast on his entire leg and chained to his hospital bed. Every day he simply lay staring at the ceiling, counting how many new cobwebs the spider in the corner had spun overnight.
To keep from losing his mind, he read any book he could reach… unfortunately, there were very few books in the hospital. If anyone had them, it was only the mothers of other children. The reading material mostly consisted of either wildly fashionable cheap esoteric books of the 1990s… fortune-telling, predictions, runes, Tarot cards, zodiacs, and everything in that spirit — or extremely saccharine romance novels. These novels always followed the same predictable plot: a young girl from the village arrives in the big city, meets a bad man who betrays her, but then a handsome rich man appears in a white Mercedes car and turns her life into a fairy tale. Almost every such book featured a prominent breast on the cover… either a large female bosom or a naked muscular male chest. Because of this, Jurii nicknamed them “books with a tit on the cover.” Curiously, after reading this chaotic mixture of esotericism and pulp romances, he never again had any difficulties understanding female logic.
Although, to be fair, among the esoteric and occult books there were occasionally quite decent works that made one think and philosophise deeply. The problem for Jurii was that he read them in a completely chaotic order, making it difficult to build any coherent system. Although, perhaps, it was precisely this disordered approach that helped form his own independent thoughts.
The local nurses, seeing that Jurii read “all sorts of rubbish” every day, constantly told him that he should not read esotericism but the Christian Bible instead. They said it was a very bright and kind book that taught love, joy, and grace. When one nurse offered to bring him this book, Jurii gladly agreed. He had heard about it, knew its important cultural and historical significance. But most importantly, he knew it was a very large book and that reading it would take a long time. And Jurii was ready to do anything, as long as he didn’t have to stare at the ceiling.
He was brought a Bible and read it from beginning to end in about a week. Some of the stories even pleased him, but when he closed the book, he had only one question: at which exact point was this book supposed to teach him love, joy, and human grace? All he had found within its pages was murder, genocide, bloodshed, incest, and endless wars of one against another. When Jurii asked this question of the nurse, she replied that if he was asking such things, it meant he had read the book incorrectly.
“Then how should one read it correctly?” Jurii inquired. “Diagonally? Backwards? Upside down? Please enlighten me, for I do not understand.”
The nurse answered that he should read it with his heart. At that moment, Jurii became genuinely afraid for his health. If the nurse believed that the anatomical organ called the heart was capable of reading, then there was no point in discussing her medical qualifications any further. He then asked whether she herself had read this book. She replied, “No,” yet continued to instruct him on how he should read it in order to understand it as deeply as she did.
It was at this precise moment that the Muslim perspective decided to enter Jurii’s life. In the neighbouring bed lay a boy who had undergone a similar operation. His father, from the Caucasus, had overheard the entire conversation and declared that Jurii was right: the Bible was all nonsense, while the Quran was the real thing. He suggested that Jurii should read the Quran instead. Jurii gladly agreed, for it was another thick book that would distract him from staring at the ceiling. The next day the man brought him the Quran, and over the following days Jurii read it from cover to cover. He was surprised to discover that, in essence, it was the same book… slightly altered, with different accents placed, but conceptually almost identical. Yet the Caucasian man insisted that the Quran was superior. When Jurii asked whether he had read both books in order to compare them, the answer was the same: he had read neither, but was nevertheless certain that the Quran was undoubtedly better. Ouch.
It was then that Jurii understood: any religion is simply faith in something one has never actually studied. If people truly read these books, their faith would vanish instantly.
From that time onward, Jurii read the sacred texts of all religions he could reach, purely as an academic pursuit. To his surprise, he found essentially the same thing in all of them. Moreover, the more famous the religion, the less logical and conceptually interesting it proved to be. For him, these were nothing more than pop culture, comparable to Hollywood or rap singers who produce mass, tasteless content understandable to everyone and no one in particular. True creativity, interesting thought, and genuine logic he discovered only in smaller, forgotten, niche cults and religions.
The days in the creepy hospital finally came to an end. Jurii left behind the scenery of that horror film and returned once more to his cold isolated concrete box. Now he could not even move, encased in a heavy plaster cast. Once again he was plunged into total isolation for several months.
Nadezhda, understanding that such silence could drive one mad, bought a small television. But it only made things worse, for it required antennas to catch any decent signal. Jurii, being a hacker, eventually managed to connect an ordinary radio antenna and began receiving local regional channels. These consisted of endless Russian propaganda recounting horrors about how the entire world sought to conquer and enslave them and steal their priceless oil, or else non-stop teleshopping channels endlessly advertising knives and miracle cleaning products. Jurii needed only five minutes of either to switch the television off forever. Notably, ever since he completely rejected the very concept of television, and to this day there is not a single television set in his home.
Several months later, Jurii, still encased in his large plaster cast, was finally able to return to Budapest, where his life resumed its familiar and comfortable rhythm. However, since we are speaking of his isolation, it is worth noting that from then on, every summer he was forced to travel with his mother back to Saint Petersburg to confirm and extend his disability documents. Thus, every summer until he came of age, he spent those months in his personal purgatory. From that time onward, Jurii has never liked summer… for him it has always meant prison.
Upon returning to Budapest, Jurii continued his hacking activities, and in 2003 he became the administrator of many sites and forums… one of them was then the largest fan forum dedicated to the film The Matrix. If Jurii could ever call himself a true fan of any franchise, it was this one. On that forum, together with like-minded souls, he wrote fanfiction set in the Matrix universe. It was those people who first told him that he should take literature more seriously. Thus, his first published literary pieces appeared on those now long-vanished internet forums.
Although Jurii spent an entire year at home in a plaster cast, he was still officially enrolled in school. At the end of the academic year he was required to take his examinations. By then he was fourteen years old. Naturally, he had not engaged in any systematic homeschooling according to the official curriculum… he studied only what genuinely interested him. Yet the examinations still had to be taken. So, knowing that the mathematics exam was the next day, Jurii took the textbook and leafed through it overnight. In the morning he went to school and passed with distinction. The following day was biology; he leafed through that textbook as well and passed with distinction once more. And so it went with every subject.
It was then that Jurii realised he could complete the entire school programme in a matter of weeks. He approached his father with this idea. Zahar replied simply: “If you want to finish the entire school programme in a month, then do it.” Jurii went to the school director and presented his plan. To understand the context, this was the same boy who had recently been expelled multiple times from different schools with an official note declaring him half-witted. Now he proposed to complete the curriculum at an accelerated pace. The director had no objection. For Hungarian pupils, however, this was unheard of. Usually students were left back a year, sometimes even two… and this was considered perfectly normal. But now someone wanted to leap forward instead.
The director permitted Jurii to advance two classes in one year. As it turned out, that year Jurii was the only pupil in the entire country who attempted such a feat. Essentially, he became the first and only student in the region to skip a grade purely because of his intellect. The plan was as follows: from the beginning of the academic year, Jurii would study the seventh-grade curriculum, and at New Year he would take the examinations for that class. If he failed, he would continue as an ordinary pupil. If he succeeded, he would study the eighth-grade programme and take those examinations at the end of the year.
Thus, Jurii once again found himself on official homeschooling. He could attend school whenever he wished. When he grew bored, he would go for a few lessons. When he grew bored at school, he simply would not appear for weeks. By New Year, of course, he passed all the examinations with ease. From that moment on, whenever he did come to school, he, to everyone’s surprise, found himself in the eighth grade, where the other children had no idea who this boy was, why he was sitting in their class, or why he came and went exactly as he pleased.
Jurii greatly cherished this freedom and believes that every child should be allowed to study in precisely this manner. Yet the days of this freedom and isolation were drawing to a close. When he passed the examinations for the eighth grade, an unforeseen miscalculation arose. To understand it, one must know how the Hungarian school system worked: children studied for eight years, after which they entered gymnasium for another four. Applications for gymnasium had to be submitted in March or April, whereas Jurii’s eighth-grade examinations took place at the end of May. He had missed the deadline. To enrol anywhere, he would have to wait another full year. What, then, had been the point of skipping a grade only to wait once more?
Fortunately, there was a solution. The very school he attended combined both school and gymnasium. The director was willing to enrol Jurii directly into the gymnasium without entrance examinations. But Jurii is not the kind of person who follows the path simply because it is the only one. He always prefers to choose. It was then that he remembered he could return to the Russian Embassy School in Hungary, where he had studied years before. Moreover, while Hungarian gymnasium required four additional years (twelve years of schooling in total), the Russian school had only eleven classes. Thus, he could save yet another year.
By that time, the entire administration and teaching staff at the Russian school had changed, so the old scandals involving Jurii had been forgotten. However, his old school friends still remembered him and were delighted by his return. It was thanks to them, that Jurii decided to change schools once again. He distinctly remembers how, in the autumn of 2003, one of his old friends from the first grade invited him to the shopping centre to walk around, talk, and watch a film. It was the first time in his life as a teenager that Jurii went out with friends… real friends. A small group of boys aged eleven to fourteen gathered. Together they went to the cinema to watch Kill Bill. They watched the bloodshed on screen, threw popcorn at each other, discussed the computer game GTA Vice City, and Jurii experienced a moment of pure happiness that he remembers to this day. It was then that he realised what he had been deprived of all those years: simple human communication and friendship. Only then did he truly understand the stories his brother had told upon returning from parties. Now Jurii was living them not in his head, but in reality. And it was then that he told himself he wanted to live every day of his life with the same brightness and intensity.
The second reason Jurii decided to return to a Russian school was his lack of formal knowledge of Russian grammar. On internet forums, people who encouraged him to write his novels often pointed out that he needed to improve his grammar. At the same time, Jurii himself had begun to realise that his understanding of the Russian language, particularly in terms of literary proficiency, was lacking. By then, he had already started work on his very first literary piece and knew that his command of Russian could be improved.
However, before accepting him, the school arranged another test session. During this test, it turned out that Jurii knew everything, except the history of the Russian state, which was hardly surprising, since during his years in Hungarian school he had studied only Hungarian history. The Russian teachers demanded that over the summer he catch up on Russian history. They would later regret this decision.
That summer Jurii once again travelled to Saint Petersburg and was once more confined within the four walls of the concrete apartment. His neighbours, knowing that Jurii needed to study history, brought him dozens of different books on the subject… from children’s textbooks to serious encyclopaedias. He had nothing else to do but sit and read.
After reading one book, everything seemed clear and logical. It all made sense. But when he immediately read a second history textbook, it contradicted the first… not in small details, but in major, significant historical events. Then, upon reading a third, it contradicted the first two, and so on. For Jurii this became incredibly fascinating: finding points of intersection between historical facts and learning to distinguish obvious fiction, propaganda, and invented stories from reality. It was precisely because of these events that Jurii developed a deep love for the study of world history… specifically in the context of seeking real truth, by examining all possible points of view at once.
