My name is Yuri Troitsky. I am a lawyer by profession, specializing in corporate tax law. I was born in Kursk, and after graduating from university, I moved to Moscow and lived there for a long time, working for various companies. In 2011, I completed a program in corporate finance at the University of California, Berkeley, and founded my own law firm. In 2014, I moved abroad with my family: first to London, then to Berlin.
I've always wanted to write, from early childhood. I'd occasionally post short pieces online and participate in the "Torn Hot-water Bottle" project. Then COVID happened, and I had time. Plus, I discovered Dima Vachedin's excellent literature courses, which proved a timely inoculation against my self-doubt. I wrote several short stories, one of which Dima edited, and Grigory Arosev, who later became the editor of my first book, published them in his magazine "Berlin. Shores" in 2021.
After publication, I began what I thought was a short story, which grew into a novel as I wrote it. The events that formed its basis happened to my acquaintances, neighbors, and clients. The novel is not autobiographical, although I am responsible for fact-checking it.
The writing proceeded more or less smoothly until the winter of 2022. After the events of February, it became clear that the values and ideals by which I (and perhaps my entire generation) had lived had suddenly become a delusion, another illusion. Our parents might have felt the same way when the USSR collapsed. I put the text aside—at the time, it seemed completely meaningless. Weeks passed, and then I suddenly wrote a conclusion—an epitaph to my unfinished novel and the era that had been cut short. Looking at the text from the outside, it seemed to me that the book was not without meaning after all and would still be useful to those interested in how things came to be and why they came to be.
Anyway, I finished it, and "Schatz" was published by Freedom Letters.