The new novel by Sergei Lebedev is perceived as a continuation of the previous one (“The Limit of Oblivion”), although they are not connected by common characters or a single storyline. However, a kind of metaplot unites them. By and large, “The Year of the Comet” is a novel about fear as one of the true “binders” that fettered Soviet reality and turned it into an immovable fortress. And to the same extent, this is a novel about the destruction of the monolith, about liberation from horror. But above all, this is the story of childhood and adolescence in the last years of the Soviet empire. Sergei Lebedev’s hero, as it were, recreates the world in time, overcoming the absence of the past: “I became an intelligence officer of my own development, a spy in the interests of my own future. And that’s the only reason what happened to me could happen to me.”