Alexander Ilichevsky, a famous novelist, laureate of the Russian Booker Prize, once admitted that he “was used to writing down a draft plan for prose in the form of verse.” Before us is a book consisting of stories that strongly resemble prose poems. Or, on the contrary, poems that represent the dotted line of a story or novel. In any case, the plots outlined in these texts resemble full-fledged stories; in them, as the author of the preface to the book, V. Gubailovsky, writes, “a lot is left unsaid, omitted, but reality pours into these cracks, like water into the hold of a ship.”