An accidental shot from a ship’s gun made by the British lieutenant Bailey Lend prevented the capture of the Crimea by the Red Army in 1920. And now, during the reign of Brezhnev, Crimea has become a prosperous democratic state. Russian capitalism has proved superior to Soviet ...

This happened before the start of the war, either at the end of May, or at the beginning of June 1941. The postman Nyurka Belyasheva from the village of Krasnoe, spilling potatoes in the garden, looked at the sky - is it lunch soon? - and saw a huge black bird falling directly on it. From horror Nyurka dead fell to the ground. And when ...

The life of Leva Odoevtseva, a descendant of the princes Odoevtsev, proceeds without any particular upheaval. The thread of his life flows measuredly from someone's divine hands. He feels himself more like a surname than a descendant of his glorious ancestors. Lev’s grandfather was arrested and spent his life in camps and exiles. In the infancy of Leo, ...

The artist of the original genre Pavel Durov spends the night at the penalty area of ​​the traffic police of a provincial town. The bumper of his “Lada” is broken by a “ZIL” watering machine, he has nowhere to shelter at night. Reflecting on why he travels around the country for no apparent purpose, Durov feels that he “lost his grooves”, lost ...

This Sunday Ryabov returns home unusually late, in the second hour of the night. The wife is sleeping peacefully, because he is not one of those husbands whose morality is cared for. However, he is both an exemplary son and a wonderful worker. The economist who defended his candidacy at twenty-seven with brilliance is a very rare case, ...

Marusya Tatarovich is a girl from a good Soviet family. Her parents were not careerists: the historical circumstances of the Soviet system, destroying the best people, forced her father and mother to occupy vacant places, and by the end of their work biography they were firmly established in the nomenclature of the middle management. ...

The protagonist, a journalist, left without work, turns over his newspaper clippings, collected for "ten years of lies and pretense." This is the 70s. When he lived in Tallinn. Each newspaper text-compromise is followed by the author’s recollections - real conversations, feelings, events. Listing in a note ...

In the second century after our era, two people are sitting in a prison cell - Tullius Varron and Publius Marcellus. The prison is located in a huge steel tower, about a kilometer high, and the cell of Publius and Tullia is located at about seven hundred meters. Tullius and Publius did not commit any crimes, ...

Several people suspected of murder testify to the investigator, which are given in the order in which they were shot. We don’t hear the questions of the investigator, but we reconstruct them according to the content of the answers of the interrogated. The person involved as a witness or suspect in the investigation ...

Three women "over thirty" live in the summer with small sons in the country. Svetlana, Tatyana and Ira are second cousins, they raise children alone (although Tatyana, the only one of them, has a husband). Women quarrel, figuring out who owns half of the dacha, whose son is the offender, and whose is offended ... Svetlana ...

The friendly company gathered for many years on Fridays at Marisha and Serge. The owner of the house, Serge, talent and common pride, calculated the principle of flying flying saucers, he was invited to a special institute by the department head, but he preferred the freedom of an ordinary junior research fellow of the World Ocean Institute. To company ...

“A man suddenly noticed that the more lucky he was in life, the less lucky some other person was,” he remarked by chance and even unexpectedly. The man did not like it. But it turned out just like that or almost like that ... ”An ordinary researcher Klyucharyov once finds a wallet in the snow on the way home from work....

On a rainy summer night of 1912, on one of the marinas of Amur, the ship leaves the young man alone. This is the German Otto Meisner, Master of Philosophy, pet of the University of Koenigsberg. The indistinct feeling that he had once been here is stored in his soul. He seems to be a double ...

Composer Georgy Bashilov, while listening to a regular, primitively crude feast song, frowns. The composer's wife explains to others that he is not offended by singing, but, on the contrary, feels guilty for the fact that his countrymen do not sing at all in the village where he comes from. Bashilov thinks that the fault ...

To the poorly furnished apartment of the Gavrilovs, Ivanov, the cohabitant of the thirty-eight-year-old Grani, returns from prison. He says that he wants to see his newly born daughter, Galya, and to live a quiet family life. The Gavrilovs do not believe him. The eldest is particularly intransigent against the drunkard Ivanov ...

Sixties. A small provincial town in Russia. Nineteen-year-old Valera Vazhenin lives with her mother and grandmother. Mom Valera works as a senior normalizer at the factory. The father left the family when his son was six or seven years old, and lives with his new wife Shura. He is a writer who writes reprises for ...

“The Yaureys have left for Israel. / Deer fled to Finland. / The fish went to Japan. / In the capital there remained instants and dissidents. They fought. ” So the poet living in Leningrad, who he calls the Capital, talks about his time. However, he calls everything in his own way, changing the usual words, not ...

The novel consists of five parts - each tells of one of the executions of the Lord that fell upon the earth, as the prophet Ezekiel predicted. Part one - “The Parable of the Lost Brother” - tells of the second execution - hunger. The scene is a hungry Ukraine in times of collectivization; 1933 in rural ...

Prayer before the dam "A poet in Russia is more than a poet." The author sums up everything that happened before, humbly kneeling, asks for help from the great Russian poets ... Give, Pushkin, his melodiousness and his ability, as if to be naughty, to burn with a verb. Give, Lermontov, your gallstone look. ...

In the youth cafe "Comet" the poet reads poetry. Girl-visitor praises poetry. For a guy sitting nearby, this becomes a reason for acquaintance. The girl's name is Natasha. The guy introduces himself as Evdokimov. He understands what Natasha likes. The next day they again go to the Comet. At night, ...