Never before have the two thousand years been described with such accuracy as in the new book by Alla Gorbunova. Children, students, beggars, young poets - her heroes and heroines - live life intensely, balancing between melancholy and euphoria, holiness and fall, escaping from the fire of family madness into the fire of the risky informal life of St. Petersburg. But Gorbunova’s stories are far from everyday life: she looks at fragile and dangerous reality with uncompromising tenderness, discerning in it an experience that can transform her characters. Alla Gorbunova is a poet, prose writer, critic, laureate of the Debut Prize (2005) and the Andrei Bely Prize (2019).