These latest stories by Galina Shcherbakova will be a complete surprise for fans of her works about “details of small feelings” and “women in a game without rules.” In her new prose, terrible reality (the Chechen war) merges with no less dark fantasy (contamination of the Earth “ murder virus"). This is a kind of “new Shcherbakova” - all three stories (“This too has passed”, “The Mark of Lilith”, “...by the name of Anna”) are written sharply, sometimes shockingly. But how else can we talk about how often in our lives good and evil are merged in one close embrace?