Sasha Filipenko is, as always (read “The Ex-Son” and “Plans”), relevant, observant, sharp-witted, and—concise. He managed again to pack a full-length, high-stakes novel into a small book. Of course, you can see the skill of a TV screenwriter from Channel One and “Dozhd,” but there’s something else too: Sasha Filipenko’s characters are his peers and contemporaries. Musicians, footballers, journalists, political technologists… They weren’t lucky with their era. They sharply feel youth running away, perhaps that’s why their dialogues are so fragmentary and coded, and their love doesn’t promise a continuation. “Bullying” is a story about the fact that cynicism and irony are by no means a universal armor. And that an attempt to slip between conscience and baseness can end with an SMS appearing on a phone screen: “On vybrosil rebenka iz okna (((…”