In essence, everything that Mikhail Ancharov—the writer, poet, and performer—created is in one way or another devoted to the very phenomenon of creativity: creativity as a reality and as an art. According to Ancharov, in every person, regardless of education and occupation—whether it’s a designer of atomic-powered vessels or a market vendor of brooms, literate or completely illiterate—there is a hidden creative seed. The only question is whether a person will allow it to sprout and whether they will manage to preserve that fragile sprout until it becomes a tree and bears fruit.
Unresting characters of Ancharov—romantic engineer Sapozhnikov, inventor of a perpetual motion machine and much more; Viktor Gromoboyev, who can command the weather and calls himself Pan, the god of natural inspiration, and a guide on a walking trail; Pyotr First Alekseyevich Zotov, who linked the key categories of being (“If you don’t understand what art is, you won’t understand what Good is, and what Evil is”)—all of them, and many other characters from the novels, novellas, and stories included in this volume, clearly demonstrate: creativity is not simply work of the hands with a brush, pencil, chisel, or fingers running over the keys of a typewriter or piano. Above all, it is a mysterious labor of the soul and the heart—even if it sounds elaborate and outdated today.
Part of the texts from the collection is being published in book format for the first time.