The book publishes for the first time the central work of the artist and poet Pavel Yakovlevich Zaltsman (1912–1985) - the unfinished novel “Puppies”, which provides a panorama of the Civil War era that is striking in its power and persuasiveness and combines the features of literary phantasmagoria, mysticism, and avant-garde experiment and realistic expression. Stories from the 1940s–50s. and the story “Memento” allow you to look at Zaltsman’s work from a different angle and understand why the discovery of this author “forces, to a certain extent, to rebuild the entire history of Russian literature of the 20th century” (V. Shubinsky).