As the publisher of this extraordinary collection of short stories said: “You should not additionally highlight a piece of glass or the surface of a lake on which a moonbeam falls: the wonderful flicker will disappear.” He said this in the sense that one should not roll out heavy weapons of literary and other profundity in relation to the light and elegant “figurines” of Nefedov’s prose. The spotlight will kill the moonbeam. I completely agree: the stories and miniatures collected under this cover hardly need comments, just as a little boy who saw a magical girl in a dream and then, many years later, recognized her in the foyer of the opera house, does not need comments. The author's drawings, with which the compiler and the publisher (with the help of an art editor) introduced the book, were quite sufficient comments. The author invariably, for many, many years, instinctively equipped the margins of his manuscripts with such drawings.