Here he is, the hero of our time. Not a Marine, not “Brother 1” or “Brother 2”, not a karateka, not a cunning special agent. Not always in a claim to fate, a whining pseudo-intellectual, for whom everyone around is to blame for not laying the carpet under his feet in time. Not a self-righteous misogynist, not a rebellious know-it-all slacker. A simple man, honest, not grabbing stars from the sky, but having his own truth. And the author fulfilled his wish - he put all sorts of otherworldly evil spirits in the hero’s path, and put conscience in his heart and a machine gun in his hands. Oh no, not in order to - whoever has a weapon is right! And the machine gun was not the main thing. What's the main thing? Read and find out. Maybe even a lot about yourself, and about your neighbor in the garden, or in the stairwell, or in general about all the seemingly ordinary people around you. Why does the novel have another subtitle - the materialist's bible? Because that's exactly what she is. Not in the sense of moral teaching or philosophical reasoning, but in a descriptive narrative. The life of nurse Korostyanov, from his birth to his death, is brief, but mainly about a few weeks that changed the world around him. The life of a man, and not the son of God, made of blood and flesh, but a life, perhaps worthy of imitation, and not requiring any canonization, according to the laws not of the church and religion, but completely earthly, no matter how you designate them - spiritual or reasonable laws, this is only two variants of the name of the same reality. And yet - this is a dispute and a rebuff at the same time to those who wish to selfishly lock the mind or spirit of a person in a cramped and stuffy cell of outdated obscurantism, brazenly deceptively “selling” to the modern, sometimes somewhat confused in the variety of the open choice, “Russian man” their ancient, damaged, stale product. The text of the book is published in the author's edition.