Angel of Russian Culture

The young poet and prose writer Nikita finds the ashes of his own novel in the drawer of his secretary—somehow burned away mysteriously. In a state of shock, he goes for a walk along Old Arbat, a historic street in central Moscow. There he receives as a gift an extraordinarily beautiful glass jar—with an angel inside. The writer goes into the past to find out the real price of the gift and the answer to the question: why do manuscripts burn? To do so, he has to become a witness to life moments of famous writers from centuries past—and even some turning points in History. Like Virgil of Dante, the angel leads the hero through the world of burned manuscripts. What made the authors destroy them? Why couldn’t the writer kindle the “life-giving flame” in the souls of readers? Why did the infernal fire rage at both the works and the “authors-to-be-recorded”? Nikita must find answers to these questions. And to do that, he will have to go to both prison and a beach, to ancient Alexandria, and to Rus’ of the last century… This book was recorded in Toronto by AI, and the author asks forgiveness for certain pronunciation errors, because the foreign AI can’t make sense of Russian.