Genna Sosonko's book is dedicated to the fate of the outstanding chess player David Ionovich Bronstein. Bronstein's peak came in the middle of the last century, when he challenged Botvinnik himself and almost defeated him, but this “almost” inflicted a wound on him that never healed for the rest of his life. The author met and talked with Bronstein several times, and these conversations, transferred to paper, recreate not only the thoughts and character of one of the most original grandmasters of the past, but also take us back to times, the analogues of which are not easy to find in world history. Not being a biography in the classical sense of the word, Sosonko’s book, read in one breath, goes beyond the biography of the hero, posing eternal questions to which there is no clear answer.