Life is written on unknown media, and man is always busy unraveling these records. “If I were an atom, I would see an ocean in a drop of water. “So in Kholochye I saw the universe,” the hero of the novel thinks about the village in which he grew up and which was wiped off the face of the earth by the Chernobyl disaster. This book is written not with words, but with meanings. The author creates a kind of phenomenological picture of life. Perhaps, in modern Russian literature it is difficult to find such an unexpected view of man, society and nature in their unity.