Andrey Bitov’s new novel consists of several chapters, each of which can be read as a separate work. These texts were written by an unknown foreign author, E. Tyird-Boffin, about an even less known author, Urbino Vanoski—while Bitov, reproducing from memory a book long lost, simply “translated it as a translated picture.” Bitov himself thinks: “The reader is free to prefer one story or the other, but if they master everything in order and catch the echo spreading from the previous to the next and from each to each, they will discover its source—that is, they will read the novel itself, not just a set of stories.”