Sapphire albatross

A provincial boy discovers the gift of seeing the world through someone else's eyes and as an adult finds himself in the St. Petersburg House on the Embankment opposite the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood. This house, too, stands on blood and the suffering of the Soviet writers who lived there, yet the ruthless critic Felix refers to this house as the Henhouse on the Canal, depicting the history of its famous inhabitants as a story of cowardice and adaptability. But for the main character, who has to go through their suffering in a phantasmagorical world, Soviet literature appears as an albatross in the henhouse. The novel is filled with vivid sketches from the past and present, there is life, tears, and love, there is the shock of a father seeing his adult son for the first time, there is a vanished monument to the Soviet era. The novel combines everyday authenticity and fascination with strong symbolic and phantasmagorical elements. What is more valuable: truth or mercy? Melikhov's novel, despite its bitter truth, is not a merciless tribunal but a search for understanding.