The third work of the famous French writer Georges Perec (1936–1982), “The Man Who Sleeps,” was published on the eve of the revolutionary events of 1968 in France. A bizarre chronicle of rejection of the outside world and a slow immersion in complete renunciation, a meticulous description of the gradual withdrawal from people and things into the zone of “rhetorical places of indifference” can be perceived as a programmatic manifesto of an entire generation protesting against the ideals of a consumer society, and as an autobiographical understanding of a personal utopian project. “Behind Perec’s virtuoso play with letters and words, behind the subtle parody, behind the burlesque stylization, there is not only an understanding of centuries-old tradition, not only debunking and unscrewing innovation - here are the pangs of self-determination, and all the complexity of a rapidly changing world, which requires constantly looking for and finding new ones means of expression."