New stories by Vladimir Sorokin are about women: in war and in a cruel world, in circumstances hostile to female nature. A guard in a concentration camp, a future star of progressive art, a little girl in a Soviet hospital, a young brilliant chess player, a perestroika student and other heroines of the collection constitute a gallery of piercing, accurate, very different portraits, united by one thing: the violence they experienced irreversibly changes them, but does not erase them, but only sharpens their individuality. Sorokin remains himself - he builds carnival dystopias, juggles quotes from canonical Russian literature and reifies metaphors - and at the same time time continues to move in a new direction. Increasing sympathy for witnesses and unwitting participants in great geopolitical dramas, narrative and lyricism, set by “Blizzard” and continued in “Doctor Garin”, are especially noticeable in “De feminis”. Sensitive to the spirit of the time and invariably ahead of the time in his assessments, Vladimir Sorokin clearly opposes the dehumanization of antagonists.