With the exception of the first chapter, the events of the story unfold a little yesterday, a little today and just a little in the near future. The setting is a fictional town in Southern Siberia, in those lands that were once called “virgin and fallow lands.” The heroes of the story can be divided by age, as is customary in our literature into “Fathers and Sons”. There is no overt conflict between them, but there is a deep misunderstanding of each other’s values. Fathers can be called swimmers with the flow, children against them. Children count on the favor of chance, but do not want to completely depend on it. They are actively looking for their way. The content of the story may seem phantasmagorical, and in some episodes even surreal. I shrug my shoulders. What to do, as they say, “we all came out of Gogol’s Overcoat.” Moreover, the modern reader will not be surprised by either phantasmagoria or surrealism. Just as with cynicism, and in a sense, eroticism and even neo-existentialism. All these are symptoms of our diseases.