Aleksey Varlamov is a prose writer, philologist, and author of several biographies of writers, as well as novels, including The Mental Wolf. Winner of the Alexander Solzhenitsyn Prize, the Big Book Prize and the Student Booker Prize.1980. Instead of the promised communism in the USSR, there is the Olympics, and no one believes in anything. Neither already - in the Soviet power, nor yet - in its collapse. The protagonist of the novel "My Soul Pavel" is an exception. He believes.Naive and dreamy, an ideological member of the Komsomol, Pasha Nepomiluev comes to Moscow from a closed secret town, where idyllic descriptions of life from Soviet newspapers are a reality. He miraculously enters the university, but instead of lectures he ends up “on a potato”, where undergraduate intellectuals open his eyes to much of the life of a big country that he loves, but hardly knows.A novel of upbringing, a novel of growing up about the first encounter with real life, about the courage to question your beliefs and defend them in front of others.