Diplomat, teacher, British press attaché and spy in Alexandria of Egypt, friend and ally of Henry Miller, elder brother of the animal writer Gerald Durrell, Lawrence Durrell (1912–1990) became famous throughout the world after the release of The Alexandria Quartet (1957 –1960), which split literary critics into two conflicting camps: some predicted the glory of the new Proust for the author, others saw him as a clever literary charlatan. Time has put everything in its place, cementing Lawrence Durrell's fame as one of the greatest British writers of the 20th century and the finest stylist, modernist and postmodernist rolled into one. For the first time in Russian - the second novel of the duology "The Revolt of Aphrodite", a transitional link from the "Alexandria Quartet" to the "Avignon Quintet", a kind of "X-Files" for intellectuals, full of oriental (and not only) exoticism, motifs of mirroring and duality, love obsession and all-consuming passion, grotesque characters and inimitable Darrell's aphorisms.