Leonid Yuzefovich is a writer, historian, and laureate of the "Big Book" and "National Bestseller" awards. In his new book "Campaign to Bar-Khoto," he returns to his favorite Eastern theme; it is a fictional story with fictional characters—but set in real surroundings. The memoirs of a Russian officer, Captain Solodovnikov, who served as a military advisor in the Mongolian army from 1912 to 1914, when the Mongolians were defending their independence from China, intertwine the siege of the fortress Bar-Khoto occupied by the Chinese, the love for the wife of a Russian diplomat in Mongolia, World War I, and the exile from Leningrad to Transbaikalia in the mid-1930s. Here, the hero rethinks his own life and, thereby, the fate of a person in turbulent times. "I endured many inconveniences here, suffered from the heat, cold, and bad water, was infested with lice, developed boils, and suffered from dysentery—but I never felt freer anywhere than in Mongolia. I did not find what I was looking for, did not write a novel, did not become a Buddhist; however, unlike St. Petersburg, where the proximity of supreme power distorts the proportions of things, where ghosts pass themselves off as men and, even more often, as women, where books ooze fog and with the ringing of gold, one buys the scent of food, where there is no truth, only expediency—here, on this barren land, I lived among the living, saw all the colors of the world, walked alongside death, loved, and was happy".
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