The first book of the writer Andrei Georgievich Bitov (1937–2018), which lay in the author’s portfolio for forty years due to circumstances beyond his control. “Bitov undertook a literary gesture permitted only to a classic writer: after publishing fifty books during his literary life, he collected and published his “first book.” This means that he took the earliest things out of the basket and compiled them into a collection, revealing page zero of his work... At the same time, he presented the beginnings of his own textual criticism and some materials for his own biography, thereby acting as his own researcher. The result was something carefully designed and very elegant, a new work by the author from very old things, something to which the spectacular current concept of an artifact fits" (S.G. Bocharov).