The glowing Vanity Boutique building is now open to the public. Alexander Ilyanen fills the empty floors of the novel-with-a-key and the novel-without-lies, the new novel and the St. Petersburg story with prose of high concentration, excellent clarity, surgical precision - and a long-forgotten example. To appreciate the capabilities of this ethereal cursive, you don’t need the skills of a decoder: some Pushkin-007 could write like this - a monkey, a tiger and a Frenchman in one transparent bottle. Maria Stepanova

Iljanen lowers words through their oscillating signs, consonances, inflections. The verbless outline of events is filed under diary cursive writing, particulars, spangles of phonemes, false biographical and literary genealogies. Thus, as a stroll, they glance past the colonial shop windows, communing with their miraculous fetishes, copies, and sculptures. Actually, the entire novel, starting with the title, is such a showcase where the author, caught in a spasm of equivocation, vainly unravels himself piece by piece, like a foreign speech, like the “sweet name of a skald”, put together and pronounced as his own. Alexander Skidan

< p>Crubs of a country cake, shards of ice and petals of military asters - the new novel by an officer of the St. Petersburg underground Alexander Ilyanen (“And the Finn”, “The Road to U”) continues the cycle of lyrical diaries with destroyed syntax, vicious punctuation and traps in every line. In the labyrinths of this book, elves await you with baskets of goods from the Vanity boutique, entry to which is open only to a select few. From private correspondence

Iljanen follows Arthur Rimbaud’s commandment to “be absolutely modern” without doing absolutely anything for this. His novel exists outside the categories of the market, even the book market. This is a genre perpendicular to the usual novels; prose of the future.Harper's Bazaar

Award named after. Andrey Bely for 2007