Yuri Cooper is a world-famous artist whose works are stored in the largest museums and collections in the world, including the Tretyakov Gallery and the collection of the US Library of Congress. “Sfumato” is a novel of a great life. The fragments that lived in memory are collected into an interesting picture, in which fictional and autobiographical episodes, real friends and fantastic women, different cities and countries appear side by side. The action in the novel often moves from the present to the past and back. The novel, filled with endless self-searching, everyday troubles and sexual adventures, is written in the first person with a fair amount of detachment and an ineradicable love for life. The experience helped the author penetrate into her nature and hear the tuning fork of her own destiny - the fate of a lonely artist.