Annotation: At a time when it feels impossible to do anything new in literature, when everything seems cliched and every subject has already been written about, Tatyana Shcherbina has managed to create a completely original work, an intelligent and powerful novel about madness, contemporary politics and the presence of the “other” within ourselves. One of the heroines of Shcherbina’s novel, Roza, has spent many years in a lethargic stupor and appears to inhabit a number of epochs — from ancient times to the Middle Ages and the last years of the Soviet Union. The other main characters in the novel undergo metamorphoses in their waking hours that are even more surprising. Shcherbina places major literary figures and themes in a present-day context. Pushkin appears in 2006 in Moscow, presidents take the form of Shakespearean characters, while Laertes is poisoned with polonium. The influence of Beckett and Kafka are clear in the novel. Senseless dreams suddenly break through the narrative, through the conflicts and details of everyday life. There is the feeling of inhabiting an endless dream from which there is no exit, and it lends the scattered plots a global, even universal meaning.