The plot of the novel, long ago posted in the Internet library of Maxim Moshkov and therefore already well known to many before the appearance of the paper edition, at first glance resembles an adventurous fairy tale like the adventures of Dunno. However, "The Suitcase Packer" is by no means a children's book. A version of the novel adapted for younger readers will soon be released, but this thick volume is a sophisticated treat for adult intellectuals with a scientific mindset and far from a secondary education. After all, as one of the characters in the book notes, “someone’s mind fits anywhere, even in the head. And for some it doesn’t fit anywhere.” In the collection of suitcases, which are nested one inside the other, like nesting dolls or the worlds of Kabbalah, there are suitcase inhabitants - people with removable heads - “pencilcases”, in which nature itself has put in so many things in the first meaning of this word that in another meaning it would never fit into the head of an ordinary person. Mastering the Suitcases, they build their world, confidently destroying internal partitions, but never go beyond the boundaries of the Last Suitcase. Their culture rests on this single taboo. But, like everything in the world, for the time being. In the end, the integrity of the “leather curtain” is violated, and the inhabitants go Outside, straight into the apartment of a modest suitcase collector... And this happened for one reason: once in Suitcases, the dissident philosopher Upendra and the ideal citizen, “son of the working people” Chemodas. The author calls the novel a “book collection” in the same sense in which this definition can be attributed to to the Bible. There are also appendices of “selected extracts from the works of various authors”, and scientific comments from the meticulous Compiler, and even “An Essay on the Life and Work of Dmitry Ivanovich Mendeleev” - after all, as you know, he also “was involved in suitcases”. Not only to write “scientific fantasy” (which in itself is an unprecedented case), but after Tolkien, only Lyashenko was able to create a whole world with its own science, philosophy, and jurisprudence in one book. “The Suitcase Collector” is at the same time a collection of funny sayings, and a utopia, and a dystopia, and adventures worse than Gulliver’s, and meticulous everyday sketches (almost the entire action of the novel takes place in the Collector’s room). Logical paradoxes and tricks, curiosities of both “internal” (suitcase) and “external” legislation (the writer herself defines the genre of “The Suitcase Packer” as “legal fantasy”), ideological problems and even love twists and turns - everything is packed by the author in Suitcases. The reader can extract what he needs or skim the surface. Olga Lyashenko is the author of another “paper” book, “About Amazing Peoples,” and a well-known online writer, an active participant in the Internet magazine “Samizdat.” O. Lyashenko is going to share the secrets of his online life with readers in his new novel, tentatively titled “ROVER-BOOK.”

Nadezhda GORLOVA “Literary Newspaper”, 2003.