In January 2013, the novel was named the “Best Book Written by a Journalist” of 2012.
"Vereshchagin" is Marina Korolyova’s first novel. The hero is a composer, a professor at a conservatory. He buys from a used-book seller a book by an unknown author from the 1920s and starts writing a concerto based on it—"concerto grosso." And that fundamentally changes his life. They throw him out of the conservatory: it’s the eighties; love falls upon him—the very one he had been waiting for all his life—and then… the book… the book disappears without a trace. What remains is Moscow we’ve already lost, the atmosphere of the era, and the hope that love is stronger than death and lasts longer than life.