The article below was submitted by Yuly Kagarlitsky (1926– 2000) for the planned 1998 edition of the translation of H. G. Wells's Experiment in Autobiography. The volume appeared only in 2007, seven years after Kagarlitsky's death, translated and published here with the permission of his widow, Svetlana Kagarlitskaya. For more on Kagarlitsky as a Wells scholar and biographer in the Soviet Union— as well as on his reputation in the West— see Chapter Five by Patrick Parrinder in the present volume.

In a Race against Time

(Gerbert Uells, Opyt avtobiografii, ed. and trans. Yu. I. Kagarlitsky, R. E. Oblonskaia, N. L. Trauberg, V. P. Zakrevskaia (Moscow: Ladomir, 2007), 614– 36.) It is amazing by what unexpected and strange routes we come to what later becomes the main object of our life's work!

Like any other child in the 1930s, I was taught German at school, but I wanted very much to read a few English-language books that we had. One of them still resides on my shelf, and it is still impressive regarding the Victorian lack of taste of its decor, though from a child's point of view, it was a rare beauty. With great difficulty, I talked my mother into teaching me the language. She taught first at the College of Oil and Gas [“Neftianoi institut”], then at the Moscow State University, and she did not at all want to be busy in the same way at home, but eventually I read through my first English book. No, it was not Wells; it was Robinson Crusoe. Then, encouraged by my success, I started on Fielding's Tom Jones, and, to my horror, could not understand anything in it. So I had to go back to the abridged and adapted series, and that was when I encountered Wells. It was his humorous short story “Mr. Ledbetter's Vacation.” As if it were only yesterday, I still remember the excellent cover of the little book, on which was depicted an appealingly silly bespectacled school teacher, who decided to dive into a world of adventures. I was eleven or twelve then, and I simply did not know that Wells was a famous science fiction writer, just as I did not have any idea about Western science fiction in general.