The book is a collection of works by the famous Russian-American philologist Alexander Zholkovsky - mostly the latest, with the addition of some that have not been reprinted for a long time. Four dozen articles are divided into five sections devoted to Pasternak's poems; Russian poetry of the 19th–20th centuries (Pushkin, Prutkov, Khodasevich, Kharms, Akhmatova, Kushner, Boroditskaya); Russian and partly foreign prose (Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Stendhal, Maupassant, Hawthorne, E. Poe, S. Zweig, Zoshchenko, Evg. Ginzburg, Iskander, Aksenov); characteristic literary topoi (the motif of dreams in dystopian novels, the motif of catalogs - from Homer and the Bible to Soviet and post-Soviet poetry and prose, the motif of the futility of efforts and a number of others); various small forms (Chekhov’s dying words, modern jokes, advertising posters, architectural design). The book is equipped with an index of names and a list of references.