Mark Kharitonov was born in 1937. In the 70s he translated German prose - G. Hesse, F. Kafka, E. Canetti. At the same time, prose was written that would not be published until twenty years later. Those who have read Kharitonov’s novel “Lines of Fate, or Milashevich’s Chest,” awarded the first Russian Booker Prize in 1992, will recognize many of the characters in this book in the novels “Prokhor Menshutin” and “Provincial Philosophy.” Here the provincial writer and philosopher Simeon Milashevich appears for the first time, for whom the province was “not a geographical concept, but a spiritual category, a way of existence and attitude to life.” The action of the last novel, “Return from Nowhere,” also takes place in a small provincial town. But this is a different province, and the times are different...