With each new novel, the excellent stylist, sage and psychologist Andrei Dmitriev (“Closed Book”, “The Road Back”, “Turn of the River”, “Bay of Joy”) reduces the distance between his fictional heroes and real contemporaries. In “The Peasant and the Teenager,” he brought them together, one might say, closely—the impression is that he had just met one (“the teenager”) on the cheerful Bolotnaya Square, and the other (“the peasant”) in the gloomy crowd near the Kursk train. “Two lonely people from parallel social worlds should be ignited by someone else's experience and shine with the light of truth. It’s just that it will be more difficult for them to get along with what it illuminates than with each other” (Valeria Pustovaya).