Under the monotonous sound of rain, an inconspicuous coffee shop in the central part of the city became a saving ark, giving hope that the abyss of heaven would drain away and would not torment the city flooded with water. What, the sun's rays will break through the dreary and vile atmospheric front and instead of the gray, unsteady veil that shrouded the world around us, the colors of renewal will come into it. No, not gray, real, in addition, illuminated by the bright rays of the Sun.

After a two-day immersion in the theatrical life of Russia, when 24 hours a day you feed on the theater and all the works of art that surround it, when from 10 am to 10 pm you are in this temple of culture and art, then the questions arise in themselves: what is Theater? How to understand whether it is good and whether the audience likes it? How to distinguish good performances from those that advertising imposes on us?

Every time I see everyone around me greedily grabbing tickets for the next performance of Charles Gounod’s opera “Faust,” I reassure myself with a funny fact that for some reason is not often mentioned. The first performance of the opera “Faust” in public is a story rather not from the field of art, but from the field of “the art of business”. They ambitiously planned four performances in London at once. Of course, no one bought tickets.

In those distant times, when old Mickey Rourke, who looked like a wax doll, did not beat homeless people in the ring for the amusement of Putin’s oligarchs, and cinema was still considered art, Francis Ford Coppola and his friends carefully buried in the ground the brainchild they created with their own hands - New Hollywood. For the 20th century, white letters on a California hill replaced the word Bible for previous times.

It is absolutely impossible to retell what happens in Guzel Yakhina’s new book: it will take a lot of time, and you will get confused anyway. Despite the fact that the reader, without deviating anywhere from a rigid chronological outline, tramples all the way around one hero and three or four supporting characters, the text manages to try on several different, completely independent plots at once.