“What does St. Petersburg stand on? In the swamp? No, St. Petersburg stands on a precarious mixture of stone and thought...” reflects the hero of the mysterious and philosophical “Petersburg poem” by Evgeniy Lukin. The new novel “An Angel Flew Across the Midnight Sky” is a subtle intellectual prose, built on halftones, written in watercolor and unsteadily, and we see the heroes of the novel as if through the fog of a gloomy St. Petersburg morning. This prose needs to be looked at and read; its symbolism needs to be deciphered. The action of the novel takes place against the backdrop of preparations for the 300th anniversary of St. Petersburg. These preparations took place in a tense, somewhat hysterical and clearly not festive atmosphere; the proximity of a catastrophe was felt. This was comparable to how the whole world became numb with anxious anticipation of the coming of the year 2000, deciding for some reason that the round date would lead to global disruptions and crises. In general, on the eve of the 300th anniversary, certain eschatological premonitions prevailed. St. Petersburg residents were preparing for the holiday as they are preparing for a natural disaster or epidemic, and many were seriously thinking about “running away” to hell. Were these fears justified?..The point is not in the political context of the 300th anniversary, not in the resignations and appointments that happened (almost already forgotten), but in what metamorphoses took place in the appearance of the city and its inhabitants, in its sacred, timeless existence. Perhaps we experienced the “end of the world” without noticing it. Despite all the phantasmagoric nature, there is little “invented” in Evgeniy Lukin’s novel; the author mythologically rethinks events that are sometimes in plain sight, but are perceived as something ordinary and the approach of a mystical and, perhaps, fateful date in the history of the city becomes the “cross-cutting” motif of the novel, each hero perceives this milestone in his own way and prepares for it in his own way.