About the book: year / Here is the second attempt to implement the autobiographical project of Heydar Jemal, unfinished during his lifetime. Each story in the book is a compilation of fragments from several dozen video recordings of monologues, dialogues, and multilateral conversations left by Dzhemal. This version of the project is fundamentally different from the previously published book, which is simply a chaotic collection of printouts issued by the compilers as the author’s “dictation.” In “Gardens and Wastelands” there are pictures of the life of a boy from a family of the post-war Moscow nomenklatura (Dzhemal’s grandfather is the “Stalinist Baskak” Leonid Shapovalov, director of the Maly Theater) are replaced by colorful sketches about the central figures of the Moscow intellectual underground of the 60-80s. Then Moscow unexpectedly, but quite organically, gives way to Tajikistan, and the origins of the Islamic revival in post-Soviet Russia are revealed to us. Reflections woven into the memoirs reveal to us the dynamics of intellectual growth from spontaneous Nietzscheanism to Hegelianism and further through French traditionalism to the final point of spiritual quest - to Abrahamic monotheism. Over two hundred comments have been added to the book, including those mentioned in the text by A.V. Yurasovsky, V. Kozlovsky, I. Dudinsky. The obvious incompleteness of the project by the author does not prevent us from enjoying Dzhemal’s words - piercing, shocking, sometimes simply pulling the rug out from under the feet of current experts on the “objective world”».