So I was going to ask the respective English-speaking audience: do we really have the situation so horribly bad here in Russia that the author, who has written some enjoyable stories, contributed every possible story in the past to the public domain, and now came to depend a little bit on the sales of his book for the well-being of the family, has to beg his fans to not steal his books and yet not meet with total understanding?! Or is this more or less what goes on in the rest of the world as well?

Yeah, things like that happen in the rest of the world, too. Creators of software are hit pretty hard, as do people who make things that are easily converted to digital format. (Printed books are kind of hard to pirate, because you have to put every single page into a scanner, one at a time, instead of just sticking a CD or DVD into a drive, but it still happens.)