One of the greatest prose writers of our time reflects on the history of the novel, on the laws of this complex genre, on its relationship with European history, on the difficulties of translation, on the fate of the novel and its authors, such as F. Rabelais, L. Tolstoy, T. Mann , F. Kafka. One of the most important themes of the treatise is connected with music, with the names of L. Janacek, Schoenberg, I. Stravinsky and other great creators of the 20th century.

The nine parts of this essay feature the same cross-cutting characters: Stravinsky and Kafka , Janacek and Hemingway, Rabelais and his followers, the great novelists of the past. The main character of the book is the art of the novel: the emergence of the spirit of humor; the mysterious connection between music and the novel, whose history, like the history of musical art, unfolded in three halves; third-half aesthetics (contemporary novel); a novel in the mirror of the great upheavals of our era: moral processes against the art of our century; broken testaments of writers in art in general and the novel in particular.