Written in 1946 by the art critic Vsevolod Nikolaevich Petrov (1912–1978), a love story about war, or a military story about love, through the power of two strangely related feelings - the fear of disappearance and the melancholy of fascination - connects “life” (an ambulance train wandering between fronts ) and “poetry” (“perfect and doomed to death” XVIII century) into “one”, as in Zhukovsky’s poem, which gave this story the epigraph, or as in Watteau’s “time-free” painting. The publication is supplemented by V. N. Petrov’s memories of Nikolai Punina, Anna Akhmatova, Mikhail Kuzmin, Daniil Kharms and Nikolai Tyrsa, as well as articles by Oleg Yuryev and Andrei Uritsky about the mystery of the “Turdean Manon Lescaut”.