The human soul, its fall or even sale is an eternal theme of world art, starting from antiquity. The question of how to lose and how to save your soul - the central theme of Irina Dedyukhova’s novel “The Time of the Harpies” - has been transferred to our days, the second decade of the 21st century. The author managed to create a unique cosmos in which muses, harpies, gorgons, sirens and the god Hermes himself act. But, despite the external similarity, Dedyukhova’s cosmogony differs from the ancient one. Its cosmos obeys different laws. The nine muses, the Parnassian sisters, do not live on Parnassus forever, but are reincarnated into people, men and women. The transformation of an ordinary person into a muse is in charge of the gorgons Euryale and Stheino, the immortal sisters of the Gorgon killed by Perseus. The muses are opposed by harpies - half-women, half-birds, eaters of human souls. Muses and harpies have fought battles for human souls throughout the centuries. The muses awakened high feelings in people through art - poetry, theater, music, opera, ballet, forcing the soul to develop and ascend upward. The god Hermes and the harpies, on the contrary, awakened a passion for power, money, and honors. A person who succumbed to them lost his soul, which went to feed the harpies.