About the book: 2009 / This man (Yu. Aleshkovsky) who hears Russian like Mozart, I think, is the first - and with joy - to recognize the primacy of the material, from whose voice he has been working for more than three decades. He writes not “about” and not “about”, for he writes the music of language, containing in itself all the existing “about”, “about”, “for”, “against” and “in the name of”; to be more precise, the Russian language writes itself with the hand of Aleshkovsky, directing the boundless energy of the language into the channel of content intelligible to the reader. Aleshkovsky will be the first - and gladly - to attribute to language his often stunning insights that litter the pages of this collection, and will probably be the first to try to absolve language of responsibility for the crazy tortuosity of this riverbed and the numerousness of its tributaries. I. Brodsky