She knows how to begin something new in literature. Not the dubious newness of the modernists, flickering before us for fifteen years now in the form of manias and destructiveness, semantic nihilism and aesthetic lustfulness, which have turned the literary space into a filthy place covered with flies. But neither is she connected to rooted, soil-based literature in an ordinary way: the semantic and ethical energy of the people’s image accumulated in the twentieth century is transformed here. For a third century now, we have loved making “exceptions from the people”: first the early Slavophiles would not admit the merchant class into the people, then the revolutionaries expelled the clergy and the “white bone” from it, and then liberals and humanists replaced it altogether with the electorate-population. The living and difficult novelty of Vera Galaktionova’s novel lies precisely in the fact that she opened the doors of her novel to our “camp” people—to prisoners, those who serve them, and those who guard over them. She opened them not in order to speak once again of the “horrors of the camps,” but to show precisely the tragic dialectic of their life, preserving in unfreedom the sovereign charm of Russia. For in the camps ended up a strong and best part of the nation, and to guard over it, driven to the outskirts of the empire, were also assigned not the worst people of the state repressive mechanism.