Pascal Quignard is one of the most significant writers of modern France. Critics admit that the work of this prose writer, rightfully crowned with the Goncourt Prize in 2002, hardly lends itself to the usual classification. For his images, hovering in the magic triangle between the philosophical essay, the novel and high poetry, there are no ready-made expressions, no words from the usual vocabulary. At the end of the 4th century AD, a fifty-year-old patrician living in Rome begins to keep a diary, or rather, something like a diary. On wax tablets she writes down her purchases, financial receipts, and funny and touching scenes. Over the course of twenty years, while records are being kept, the Roman Empire decays, the power of Christianity increases, the Goths besiege Rome three times, and Apronenia Avicius scrupulously points out how many bags of gold came from the province, reminds himself that he needs to add three spoons of snow to the wine, and monitors the flight swallows, dispassionately or with sudden bitterness, records the signs of his own old age, the decrepitude of friends and lovers. And these femininely inconsistent notes contain a substance of such concentration that the time locked in the bottle knocks out the cork and the tart aroma of the era spreads in the air, which is sometimes worth the weighty volumes of Titus Livius. The novel “Notes on the Tablets of Apronenia Avicia” (1984) by P. Quignard - one of the most striking events in European prose of the late 20th century. Kignard's prose - laconic and surprisingly capacious - recreates the patrician world of Ancient Rome, amazingly with an unprecedentedly accurate fit into the atmosphere of the era.