The Guys. Kazan Youth

The most valuable thing a person receives is life. There are no boring lives—what matters is being able to tell about them in an engaging way. This book is the story of real life in the seventies and eighties, seen through the eyes of a young boy from Kazan, who grows up before our very eyes.

This is a narration about the unforgettable era of “developed socialism,” which left in memory both a sense of wholeness and an inner sense of contradiction—about the time when a great country flourished, but over the years grew increasingly distant, slipping into the realm of legends. The author simply wanted to go back there—not to slander and not to embellish, but to speak “from within the time itself,” because, in a way, he, too, remained in those years. “The world exists so that you can put it into a book”—that is a well-known phrase. And the idea that the world “will be saved by beauty”—a catchphrase of its own.