Vladimir Sharov's new novel tells the story of a family closely intertwined with the fate of Russia in the 20th century. Revolution and Civil War, collectivization and the Great Patriotic War, years of “stagnation” and perestroika, and finally, the social nightmare of the 1990s - all this constitutes not just the background of the novel, but its subject, the material that the writer, on the one hand, uses to create a work of art, and on the other hand, he researches, comprehends as a historian and as, no less, a philosopher who is interested in the philosophy of history.