What is Yuriy Petukhov’s “Kruzhoviert” (“The Whirligig”)? It’s a novella written in the early 1980s that might seem out of date today only to someone who can’t draw simple parallels. This is a story that shows: a person who earned fame with provocative “black fantasy” novels could write seriously! It’s a novel about a person… but not the REAL MAN with a blaster and flames in his eyes—rather the kind of person Gorky and Dostoevsky wrote about, Turgenev and Gogol. It’s simply Russian literature.