The Mammoth

Kирill Es'kov is obsessed with the dream of finding the remains of a mammoth. One writer gets into a time machine and travels to the future—and what he sees there turns his understanding of the world upside down. Physicist Lebedev, risking his life, secretly transports across the Caspian a device capable of carrying people through time and space. There are many characters here: each has a great goal of their own, but they are all invisibly bound together by a single story—one that none of them suspects yet.

In “The Mammoth,” two threads bizarrely intertwine: a mysterious time machine that passes endlessly from one set of hands to another, and the search for the last mammoths that once lived in the Far North. Alongside fictional heroes, real people appear, and characters from different books begin speaking with one another. The novel sometimes disguises itself as an adventurous tale, then turns into meticulous historical prose, and at times transforms into a truly frightening horror.

The mystic writer Vladimir Berезин constructs his own universe with almost demiurgic grandeur. From book to book (“SNT,” “The Pentagram of Osoaviakhim,” “The Mammoth”), romantics and idea-obsessed seekers move along—trying to find answers to eternal questions. Their devotion to these pursuits will not go unrewarded: the last mammoth will surely come toward the one who has waited, searched, and called for it through the centuries.