“The body of works of Andrei Dmitriev is a multifaceted and harmonious, internally unified narrative about what happened to us and our country both in the last thirty years and earlier - from the revolution to the late Soviet era, which considered itself eternal. Dmitriev's diverse heroes - intellectuals and hard workers, metropolitan residents and provincials, old people and fledgling youths - search, find, lose and again search for the main value in life - freedom, without which every feeling turns into a dull dummy. Dmitriev’s prose is free, and therefore his stories, novellas, and novels indisputably prove: today, as before, the sense of belonging to history (responsibility for it), and poetry, and love are real” (Andrei Nemzer)The first book of the Collected Works of Andrei Dmitriev includes the stories “Calm”, “Steps”, “Proletary Elistratov”, the stories “Voskoboev and Elizaveta” and “Turn of the River”, as well as the novels “The Closed Book” and “The Road Back”. The novel “The Closed Book” was awarded the Apollo Grigoriev Prize (2001).