The novel “Ship of the Dead” (1926) marked the beginning of the world fame of Traven (1882-1969), an anarchist writer, participant in revolutionary unrest in Germany, who left Europe in 1924 and lived in Mexico until the end of his days. In Traven's books, a protest against the controlled world, against attempts to make the existence of the human individual completely “transparent” is expressed with rare force. The hero of his first great novel, a passportless sailor who ends up on a dubious “box” - a modern ghost ship, which becomes a grandiose symbol of the entire Western civilization, also faces the bureaucratic mechanisms of total control.