Winner of the Bronze Snail Award (1997) A psychological novel written from the perspective of a historian living at the end of the 21st century, observing one day of the past - a seemingly unremarkable August day in 1975, on which events that turned out to be key to the subsequent existence of humanity. What determines the future? What saves people from the unknown dangers that await them in the future? Step by step, hour by hour, the historian traces the behavior of the young Leningrader and the various people he met that day, from the general of the signal troops to the street teenager, and is convinced that meanness entails meanness, and decency entails decency, and to break the chain The reaction to the growth of evil in the world is capable only of those who, without knowing it, unconsciously, simply because they cannot do otherwise, respond to meanness with decency, to evil with goodness... inevitably suffering at the same time tenfold, a hundredfold...