What Kabiasses Sing About. Notes of a Free Commentator

Hiding from the gloomy times in a virtual past, Viktor Shcheben, the alter ego of the author — a fictional, yet thoughtful and active character, - began to comment on the difficult passages and mysterious phenomena that, for one reason or another, attracted his attention in the ode to Felice Derzhavin, in "A Hero of Our Time", in the letters and stories of Gogol, in the novels of Ilf and Petrov, in the neo-romantic poetry and prose of Maxim Gorky, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Eduard Bagritsky, and Yuri Kazakov. At some point, the commentary broke free from strict academic control and, drawing in new materials and contexts, began to swell and develop in an unpredictable, yet, as it seems to us, intriguing direction.

So what is this book about? It is about life, of course. About how everything in it is interconnected, astonishing, terrifying, illusory, and incomprehensible. About the spirits and demons of literature, about cultural rhymes, about politics, love (including physical love), joys, imagination, foolishness (including poetic foolishness), and fears; about kings and cabbage, about the patterns and inkblots of history and a little bit about me as a part of it and a free, though somewhat boring, somewhat nearsighted, and even somewhat seemingly insane, commentator.