Andrei Bitov's new novel consists of several chapters, each of which can be read as a separate work. These texts were written by an unknown foreign author E. Tyrd-Boffin about the even less famous author Urbino Vanoski, and Bitov, reproducing a long-lost book from memory, simply “translated it as a decal.” Bitov himself believes: “The reader is free to give preference to one or another story, but if he masters everything and hears the echo spreading from the previous to the next and from each to each, then he will discover its source, that is, he will read the novel itself, and not a set of stories.”