Pavel Basinsky, a well-known critic and journalist, undertook, in essence, an impossible task: recreating the Russian novel in its universal form. His book brings together a detective story, a “love story,” a mystical novel, a political novel, an adventure novel, and so on. It’s a “many-voiced” novel with more than fifty characters, where alongside an engaging literary game, serious topics are raised: the fate of Russia at the turning of the 20th and 21st centuries, the problem of national character, the search for faith and truth…