This is a novel for women and a small number of men, as well as a special kind of select readers who understand the self-sufficient ringing of verbal beads with which the author, in accordance with his tastes, tried to decorate the simple space of the novel. I would like, however, to hope that all readers, regardless of their preferences, will be lenient towards the author - at least for his desire to build elastic metaphorical muscles on the skeleton of the plot, with whose play he hoped to enliven the dry skin of the narrative. The author adheres to the misconception that if the task of a sculptor and a poet is to cut off the superfluous from the material, then in prose it should be the other way around: the more verbal marble the author gets, the better, and let the reader himself cut off all the superfluous. It should also be warned that this novel is not about love, but about its clinical manifestations, about its ghost and the pursuit of it through the very rugged terrain that is the modern world, about that play of feelings that, flaring up like neon lights, owe their bizarre tints and shades mainly to the incorrigible underground electricity of Russian public subsoil. The author proceeds from the fact that love on a desert island is not at all the same as on an inhabited island, especially if this island is Russia. That is why we are so curious about the thick, absurd shadow that the country casts, so to speak, on itself, forcing its heat-loving inhabitants to look, as has long been our custom, for other stars, other skies. Perhaps someone then he will reproach the author for excessive attention to the erotic experience of the heroes. We hope, however, that our description of this fundamental aspect of intersexual relations, without which they are as insipid as they are lifeless, is rather prim than cheeky and that those who suddenly seem to be wrong will be that the further we poke our nose into our history, the more it resembles an appointment with a sex therapist.