An essay about the architect's journey to the center of the assembly of the novel "War and Peace." At the very beginning, the author draws out the ordered meaning of Tolstoy’s epic - and goes to the writer’s estate for confirmation. But instead of order, he finds chaos: an estate without an ancestral home. And the entire novel appears as a “focus”, in one moment, containing the entire history of the family, “the purpose of time”, a central building built on the site of a lost house.