St. Petersburg resident Samuil Lurie is one of the best Russian essayists, the author of the books “The Writer Pisarev”, “Interpretation of Fate”, “Conversations in favor of the dead”, “Achievements of Clairvoyance” and others. His new book is a well-executed mosaic of several selected works and individual literary themes, a panorama assembled from multi-colored fragments of literature from different eras. Lurie’s view of literature is specific, this vision is, rather, not of a literary researcher, but of a critic, a contemporary, subject to influence poetics of postmodernism. The look is shameless, admiring, but also does not recognize the personal authority of the classics.