“Nikolai Nikolaevich” by Yuz Aleshkovsky is a bestseller. A published, sold, popular book. But this foreign word does not convey another, most important property, feature of the bestsellers that were born in the Soviet Union. This is the rewriting of literary works by hand, their distribution in a makeshift way - in foggy copies of a typewriter, in pages stained with coal dust from a photocopier... A Soviet bestseller is, first of all, a work free from censorship. Which, as in Bradbury’s famous novel, was memorized by heart and retold to each other when there was no happy opportunity to read even the tenth, tattered copy of the legendary original. And, if it was relatively easy to become a member of the Soviet Union of Writers (there were about ten thousand of them, now almost forgotten), then only a few became the authors of “homemade”, “man-made” Russian bestsellers, true writers, marked with the seal of God... “Nikolai Nikolaevich Aleshkovsky was rewritten, reprinted and retold. Andrei Bitov called it a “monument of literature.” Yes, also a “monument”. Not every bestseller becomes a monument. More than forty years have passed since Aleshkovsky’s famous novel was written in joyful inspiration and distributed throughout the Russian-speaking space. With the above methods of distributing the manuscript, it is not difficult to imagine how many clerical errors, misprints and simply conjectures of entire paragraphs occurred. And now on the Internet you can find “Kizma” instead of “Kimza” and other flaws and typos that not every reader pays attention to. But they were paid attention to by the author, who, as a master of words, was hurt by this state of his beloved brainchild. In addition, over the years, the author himself has changed. And what once, in his distant youth, seemed wonderful and almost perfect to him, already hurt his eyes. What remained from the former “Nikolai Nikolaevich” was “only the memory of the joy of past inspiration, and joy similar to happiness...”. The bestseller needed improvement. He needed an upgrade. In the spring of 2014, Yuz Aleshkovsky completed work on a new edition of the work, accompanied by the remark: “the mechanic is pleased with himself, having rebuilt the engine and replaced the cylinder rings.” This only correct and final version of the novel is presented to the attention of fans of “Nikolai Nikolaevich”: “Nikolai Nikolaevich” (upgrade). Alexander Dunaenko.