“This is a mirage, smoke, fiction!.. What is this devastation of yours? Old woman with a stick? The witch who broke all the windows and put out all the lamps? Yes, it doesn’t exist at all!.. Devastation sits... in our heads!” This non-existent epigraph to the novel by Vladimir Zarev is from Bulgakov’s story “The Heart of a Dog.” Zarev tells the story of a double fiasco: the businessman Boyan Tilev, who absolutely fit into the “new life,” and the writer Martin Sestrimsky, who also absolutely did not fit into it. Their lives are recreated with almost documentary-like care, removing the danger of primitive moralizing. The “devastation” that has struck the consciousness of these undoubtedly talented people (money, in which they imagine independence and freedom) leads both to collapse.