About the book: 2020 / This is an extraordinary book. Prose? Yes, definitely. Convinces from the very first pages. And it’s not just that its author, Elena Makarova, writes in such a way that once you start reading, it’s hard to put it down. This is, so to speak, her signature feature. But also - and this is perhaps even more important - she molds the characters in such a way that it is impossible to doubt their authenticity. The same can be said about the circumstances in which the heroes live and act. A middle-aged woman living in Sydney who emigrated from Russia a long time ago receives an unexpected parcel containing a literary text about herself. The author (she is no longer alive) is an almost forgotten friend of her youth, the time of action is the mid-late 1980s, the place of action is the USSR on the eve of perestroika. A former resident of an empire that collapsed three decades ago finds herself in front of a mirror, recognizes something in it, disagrees with something, and comments on something, not without irony. Each character has a twist, the details of time are scrupulously accurate, the comments are right on the mark, some correcting, some confirming. Yes, this is prose. In the first part. And the second is a strict document. Authentic letters, notes, notes, reflections on the pages of Russian - and not only - history of a real person, a scientist, a “sentee” who experienced a lot, knew a lot and thought about a lot. In the first part, this is one of the characters in the story with whom he could have had an affair, but his heroine’s romance did not take place. The second is the publication of a significant part of the archive of the outstanding geneticist Vladimir Pavlovich Efroimson, which he gave to the author of the book that you are about to read. This is how Elena Makarova combines “fiction” with “non-fiction”, merging into a single whole. How she came across this form of a book is a mystery known to her alone. Just like the mystery of why we read all this “plusquaperfect” as if it were dedicated not to yesterday, but to today in the full sense of the word.