Irina Polyanskaya made her debut in 1982 with the story “How Steamships Are Seeing Off”, and in the late 80s she was part of the group of young writers “New Amazons”. If Irina Polyanskaya’s first novel “The Passage of a Shadow” is dedicated to music, then in “Reading Water” the main character is cinema. Director Vikenty Petrovich, the founder of cinema, a contemporary of Eisenstein, Dovzhenko and Dziga Vertov, agrees to give an interview to graduate student Tatyana. Talking about himself, the Master opens the door to the world of cinema, full of myths and hoaxes, and talks about the legendary actresses with whom he was closely acquainted. Once upon a time, Vikenty Petrovich made a brilliant film, but the film was destroyed by the Stalinist commission... The history of cinema is connected with the history of the country, the scale of what is covered is amazing. The book also includes stories by Irina Polyanskaya.