The Blue Sky is the first part of my autobiographical trilogy. It describes my early childhood and ends with my rejection of Father Sky. The second part, The Gray Earth, deals with the violence inflicted on me when I underwent a period of reeducation in a totalitarian school system. The outlawed art of shamanism competed with the body of knowledge of a modernity under communist rule. Outer violence triggered resistance: I recanted my rejection of Father Sky from the end of the trilogy’s first part, and fie cely chose a return to my roots. The trilogy’s final part, The White Mountain, traces the unavoidable mental breakdown of the adolescent forced to lead a double life. Both of the latter books contain stories more tragic than those in The Blue Sky, but since the art of survival is strong among nomads, some primordial serenity hovers above everything. I survived and was preserved for that small, vanishing remainder of my people for whom each member is vital. By the end of the trilogy I arrived in the wider world, and although still a blind human pup, I had already forgotten how to whimper. I thought then that life had tanned me; that the period of my life during which I had been cooked and left to ferment like mare’s milk had come to an end. But today I know that each new phase in life brings its own boiling heat with which to get under your skin; its own paralyzing cold; and its own murderous poison—powers none can get past without making the required sacrifi es.

I have been one who has hastened with seven-league boots across our planet’s racked fi ld of history. One who has been particularly indifferent, even careless, about three things: my career, clothing fashions, and literary trends. Although my views about other things in life have continued to change, my fundamental faith in the indivisibility and immortality of a soulful and spirit-filled universe has, I believe, remained unshakable. Humankind, which for me in the beginning meant my small tribe of Tuvan people, has grown larger and richer in my heart with the addition of other peoples. Now, the publication of The Blue Sky extends it for me even further by including the peoples of North America. I am mightily pleased, not least for these peoples themselves, whose world, in turn, will now include the mountain steppe of Central Asia, and whose awareness of humankind will embrace the nomadic people from that corner.