This novel is a “collection of motley chapters”, where each chapter is named with a line from Pushkin and is an independent story about one of the heroes. And there are many heroes in the novel - a gifted musician of the post-war period, a “sweet womanizer”, and a homely, exemplary schoolgirl of the mid-50s, in whose soul passions that are invisible to the world burn - envy, jealousy, forbidden love; an orphanage boy, a nuclear physicist, the son of a repressed commissar and a village fire victim, a witness of the Gulag, and many, many others. Private stories grow into a picture of Russian history of the 20th century, but the novel is not a historical canvas, but rather a multifaceted family saga, and the further the narrative develops, the more the destinies of the heroes become intertwined around the mysterious Katenin family, descendants of “that same Katenin,” Pushkin’s friend. The novel is full of mysteries and secrets, passions and resentments, love and bitter losses. And increasingly, an analogy arises with the narrowly scientific concept of the “Rehbinder effect” - just as a drop of tin breaks a flexible steel plate, so an insignificant, at first glance, event completely changes and breaks a specific human life. “Short stories, elegantly strung, like beads on a thread: each one of them is a separate story, but suddenly one plot flows into another, and the fates of the heroes intersect in the most unexpected way, the thread does not break. The entire narrative is deeply melodic, it is permeated with music - and love. Some people are spoiled by love all their lives, others struggle painfully for it. Classmates and lovers, parents and children, a strong and indestructible unity of people, based not on blood kinship, but on love and human kindness - and the thread of the plot, on which a few more beads have been added, is still strong... This is how human relationships stand the test of Stalin's time, the “thaw” and the hypocrisy of “developed socialism” with its peak - the Chernobyl disaster. The thread does not break, almost contrary to Rebinder’s law.” Elena Katishonok, winner of the Yasnaya Polyana Prize and finalist of the Russian Booker