The name of the American writer Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) is known even to those who have never read her works. It was she who dubbed the young people returning from the First World War the lost generation. It was she who said that an artist needs not critics, but connoisseurs. She saw the task of her writing as destroying the superficiality of the reader’s perception and returning its depth to the word. Her writing style is designed to be read aloud, not with the eyes. Her sentences are almost completely devoid of punctuation. “People think without punctuation,” she wrote. In her book “Paris France” (without a comma, of course), Stein describes life in the south of France at the beginning of World War II - still at a time when there was still hope that a pan-European war was on the way won't reach...