The person to whom I owe my fate was my grandmother. My parents were not there to take part in bringing me up, so my first consciously made steps in life grew from her love and care. Once she found for me an exciting book: Brer Rabbit's Adventures, translated into Russian. I learnt to read with this book. It was my grandmother again who bought for me, on a flea–market,my first popular book about science. It was a very difficult time, the Second World War was raging and the family was evacuated to the town of Krasnokamsk on the Volga. People thought about food first, books were very secondary. But my grandmother — mind you, she had no education whatsoever — felt, perhaps, that food for thought was just as necessary for kids as food for the stomach. The book that she bought (or swapped?) was marvelous; I will never forget it. It was Children's Encyclopaedia, a pre–1917 book, with wonderful color prints. As far as I can remember, their quality was far superior to the often smeared and bleak illustrations that I find nowadays in some editions of books that I write.

That book had a chapter about astronomy. Browsing for the first time through the volume (as for any other kid, this was the first thing to do with a new book), I was amazed by a drawing of a gigantic fountain of fire, with a small globe of our Earth alongside.