Leonid Yuzefovich - writer, historian, author of documentary novels-biographies - “Autocrat of the Desert” about the mysterious Baron Ungern and “Winter Road” (Big Book and National Bestseller awards) about the last romantic of the White movement, General Anatoly Pepelyaev, an adventurous novel about the nineties “Cranes and Dwarfs”, which was based on the myth of the eternal war of cranes and pygmy dwarfs known from Homer’s “Iliad” (Big Book Award), a memoir-novel “Cazarosa” and a collection of short stories “The Lighthouse on Hiiumaa.” “Philhellene – “loving the Greeks.” In the 20s of the 19th century, this name began to be given to those who sympathized with the struggle of the Greek rebels against the Ottoman Empire or took direct part in it. The main character of the novel, retired staff captain Grigory Moscepanov, considers himself a Philhellen, like Byron, who went to Greece and died there. This is a fictional character. Unlike my documentary books, here I gave free rein to my imagination, but I embroidered my patterns along the canvas of real events. The action begins in the Nizhny Tagil factories, continues in Yekaterinburg, Perm, Tsarskoe Selo, Taganrog, from Russia is transferred to Nafplion and Alexandria, and ends in Athens, on the Acropolis. Among the central characters of the novel are Alexander I, the mystic baroness Julia Kridner, the Egyptian commander Ibrahim Pasha, and other real figures, but my role was not limited to the choice of colors when painting them. Reconstructing the past was not my goal. Philhellene is more a variation on historical themes than a traditional historical novel.” Leonid Yuzefovich