The work of Evgeny Kharitonov (1941–1981) is at the intersection of several significant lines in Russian prose of the 20th century. A certain cryptographic nature of the writing, encoding the emotional and event series with a kind of marks of feeling and event brings Kharitonov’s prose closer to the prose of Pavel Ulitin (and further - with the Proustian and Joycean traditions in world literature); Kharitonov is also related to Ulitin by his interest in the expressive properties of specifically typewritten text graphics (especially in the work “Novel”). The thematization of the distance between the author and the lyrical subject, important in some of Kharitonov’s texts, largely anticipated the further work of conceptual writers (Viktor Erofeev, Vladimir Sorokin). In addition, Kharitonov is known as one of the founders of Russian gay literature, who convincingly described the psychological type formed by the situation of a legal and cultural ban on the manifestation of one’s feelings.