August 14, 2000 at 12:47:42 p.m. time stopped on Earth. Seventy people who have just been on an excursion to the European Nuclear Research Center emerge from the depths of the earth where the DELPHI detector is hidden - and life freezes around them. The whole other world is plunged into a stupor: time does not exist in it, as well as movement, sound, sensations, breathing - nothing except a museum of eternally warm human wax figures and the luxury of universal loneliness, in which a handful of the chronicled wander lost. Adrian Haffner, a former journalist, wanders through frozen Europe for five years along with other “world bead players” who seek salvation from time in timelessness, and chronicles the years that never happened. Thomas Lehr, student and successor of Nabokov, Musil and Mallarmé, wrote one one of the most significant novels in modern European - and world - literature. "42" is a story of comprehension of time, a scientific satire, a novel about the future, a parable about enlightenment and statehood and the story of a midlife crisis on a cosmic scale.

In modern German literature, very diverse and quite unpredictable, there is one theme , which apparently to some extent determines the current worldview of the German literary public: universal loneliness. Not figuratively—everyone can do figuratively—but literally. When there is no one around. That is, no one at all. Seventy people come to the surface after an excursion to the European Nuclear Research Center - and time stops around them. It is not known exactly why they were washed up on the ocean shore as half-dead fish. timelessness, in which others remain without visible suffering - including their children, wives, husbands, friends. The world stopped. The sun froze. Dials have died. For five years, seventy people live like any other society. All the paths and misconceptions of human history in a world model on a scale of 1:86,000,000. All theories of state development are implemented within a five-year period. If you follow simple rules, seventy “zombies” can not deny themselves anything. A tolerable life, sex with anyone without the slightest risk of being turned away, a lot of money that is not needed at all. People found themselves in ideal conditions - on the island of Utopia, in the City of the Sun of the 21st century. The laws of existence are being revised - from physics to culture and morality. Two years pass, and anti-personnel mines become more urgent than watches - the only a flimsy anchor immersed in real time that does not exist. What happened is too strange - therefore, everything that was known about the world until now can be completely canceled. What will happen if humanity is simply turned off? What happens if you go outside one day and nothing happens? What is it like to remain a living person in a developed, modern, progressive, friendly, but petrified Europe, a three-dimensional figure in a flat photograph. The simplest model, the most elementary assumption - and from them grows a world of amazing depth, ingenuity and detail. The text is logical and dizzying, like the theory of relativity, and elegant, like the prose of Nabokov, whose student Lehr considers himself. 2005, the International Year of Physics, was also declared the year of Albert Einstein in Germany. Two round dates coincided: 50 years since the death of the scientist and 100 years since his discovery of the theory of relativity, after which science changed forever. The novel “42” was published in 2005. And in March 2006, Thomas Lehr held literary readings at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN). I wonder what the physicists asked him about. Maxim Nemtsov, project coordinator