Irina Polyanskaya’s novel “The Passage of a Shadow” is musically virtuoso, flexible prose with a very strong confessional element. It tells about the bizarre friendship of the heroine, a music school student, with four blind musicians. The girl becomes for them something like a guide, a guide in a world where the boundaries of knowledge about themselves are blurred, and the mysteries of the human heart will always remain a mystery. Parallel to the main line, another, family line is developing, gravitating toward the best examples of “women's prose.” In its center is the “fatal duel” that filled the entire life of his mother and father, a talented scientist; his fate largely repeated the fate of N. Timofeev-Ressovsky. The book also includes stories by I. Polyanskaya.