“In one of the Slavic villages there lived a crippled guy, until a wanderer, a gray-haired old man, stopped at his house.” This is how the legend of the healing of the Russian hero Ilya begins. It was not the passersby who taught Ilya how to fight: the elder turned out to be a warrior and healer who came from the lands of India and China. And Ilya learned many arts from him. The youth of Ilya Muromets and his mysterious teacher will be discussed in “Addressed to Heaven,” where fairy tales are intertwined with epics, and epics with the history of ancient Rus', where Vladimir the Prince sat on the Kiev throne, across the steppes The Khazars roamed with the Pechenegs, and in the forest one could meet not only dashing people, but also Leshy, and even the robber Nightingale himself