The Bear Keeper

The action of the fifth novel in the "Family Album" series takes place in Moscow in 1955. People are gradually returning from camps, it is now possible to talk about "dangerous" topics, but the XX Congress of the CPSU has... not yet taken place. Our beloved hero Anton Klobukov, a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences, is still very much stuck in the past, reminiscing and mourning about deceased loved ones. And if it weren't for the meeting with the "bear keeper," who knows how this person's fate would have unfolded.
In addition to the always accurately noted traits of the time, the book is given special charm and intrigue by small stylized inserts - we, with the characters, find ourselves in Ancient Rome, in a plane crash, and even in a village of Old Believers miraculously preserved in Siberia.
And of course Akunin-Chkhartishvili cannot do without reflection and extremely interesting mental constructs. But this time the exploration of human nature concerns not pedagogy, as in "Trizium," but the compatibility of women and men, and even love.