The Steppe Book was first published in 1998, when its author was twenty-eight years old. Today he is one of the most famous writers of his generation, although his work remains a mystery. Oleg Pavlov is directed inside his hero, but his prose cannot be called only psychological; its images are imbued with confessional poetic power. Her stories are scary, but warmed by faith and love for people. He shows the dark limits of life, the world of human suffering, possessing a rare knowledge of both this world and life for people of his generation, but what could be a social exposure becomes a study of existential timeless experience. Pavlov is truly able to show close-up the implicit, where absurdity turns into reality, and reality into tragic absurdity. According to literary critics, he writes about what Sartre and Shalamov, Camus and Solzhenitsyn, Platonova and Kafka, Hamsun and Dostoevsky wrote about before him... But, nevertheless, for many years, remaining himself, he stood and continues to stand in modern literature apart, a very separate representative of his own direction: his prose.