This novel was recognized as the best in 2000, and its author received the Booker Prize for it. This is a mystery novel, a mystery novel, the very name of which already contains intrigue, because least of all the work correlates with a well-known military-historical event. The Taking of Ishmael is not at all like a canonical historical novel, although it is based on events from our past. A pre-revolutionary criminal court - and then there are scenes of life from Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev times. Heroes are real and fictional, typical; modern vocabulary and Old Church Slavonic stylizations - the author seems to emphasize the equivalence of all times and events for Russia, their complete interpermeability.