Flight to Egypt. Petersburg Light and Shadows

The book of selected works by Alexander Etoev mainly consists of works closely related to the city where the author was born and has been living for more than half a century. The stories "Flight to Egypt," "The Rule of the Left Foot," "Waterproof Gunpowder," the novel "The Man from the Web," and the short stories—everywhere the city is hardly anything less than a main character and influences the fate of the characters no less than the Petersburg weather does. The last novel of the writer, "The Flying Martian Ship," also does not stray from the Petersburg theme. Lunina, the hero of the novel, is forcibly transported to Mars, into the world of the dead, not from just anywhere, but from Petersburg's Kolomna, where a nose once wandered the streets, having escaped from its owner, and where the hero of "The Bronze Horseman" threw his decisive "Mind you!" in the face of the statue. And the old Leningrad tram "climbed onto the Egyptian bridge, hesitated a bit, and then sank behind the pyramid houses" ("Flight to Egypt").