Lenа Eltang’s heroes are always a little homeless. Culture gives them the feeling of “home” and replaces the place where they live. One might say that, with paradoxical literalness, they embody Mandelstam’s formula that Hellenism is a stove pot. This is how critic Igor Gulin responded to one of the author’s texts. Lenta’s new book continues the tradition: it is not only a classic novel about a Russian writer who finds herself in a dangerous story on foreign soil, and not only a detective drama that includes crime and punishment. First of all, it is a travel journal of an escapist—of a lost European, a rational person full of recklessness; it is a diary of a romantic, immersing us in the space of the hero’s consciousness—someone living simultaneously in two dimensions: subjective social reality and the space of a personal myth.