The hero of Maxim Osipov’s story “Figures on a Plane”, having learned that, following the denunciation of his father, six of his friends were sent to the Gulag, he renounces both his name and the surname belonging to an old noble family. “Although...” (mother) will smile sadly, “it was a beautiful surname.” He also refuses the country, preferring to live in the United States. In private life it is not so easy to get rid of history.