At the very beginning of the seventies, a sensation, rare for those times, spread in reading circles. The novel "The Dervish and Death" by Mesha Selimovic, a Bosnian writer, who in those years, of course, was called Yugoslavian, was translated in some unknown way and broke into the Soviet press. It is written in the form of a confession of a man, a Muslim schemnik from the Mevlevi order, from a small Bosnian town (quite possibly Tuzla, the author's homeland) in a generalized 17th century.