Maria Golovanivskaya is a graduate of the Moscow State University faculty. At thirty, she is already a Doctor of Science, and it would seem that she has a successful scientific career ahead of her. However, curiosity and a desire for a “change of fate” turned Golovanivskaya first towards “cool” journalism, then into the advertising business. At the same time, prose was written - sometimes philosophical short stories, sometimes fairy tales, sometimes something purely experimental. The novels and stories included in this book are about love, and more precisely, about passion, always unexpected, inappropriate, when common sense enters into an unequal struggle with the power of feelings, and the desire for freedom is defeated by absolute dependence on another. Both novels mirror each other: in the first (“Contradiction in essence”) the hero, a middle-aged scientist, is absorbed in feelings for a young girl who is playing at the ease of relationships with men and with life; in the second (“I Love You”), a forty-year-old successful businesswoman falls victim to a reckless passion for her friend’s son...