About the book: 2012 / Boris Dyshlenko Lyudmila. Detective poem - St. Petersburg: Juolukka, 2012. - 744 p. ISBN 978-5-904699-15-4 Like many readers of Leningrad samizdat, I was once struck by an excerpt from the novel “Lyudmila” by Boris Dyshlenko published in Obvodny Canal. I wanted to know what the truly grandiose plan would result in. We had to wait for more than a decade. And when the novel was finished in 2006, it turned out that it also took years to find a publisher. The subtitle “detective poem” obviously indicates following the great models - “Dead Souls” and “Moscow-Petushki”. But the poetics of “Lyudmila” were most likely borrowed from the legendary author of “Tristan and Isolde” Tom, who introduced the definition of the “novel” genre. Of course, there is a gulf between the medieval chivalric novel and the modern novel, but the poetic function of B. Dyshlenko’s novel seems to bring closer those distant times when novels were written in verse. Boris Lichtenfeld © B. Dyshlenko, 2012© Kidl (cover picture), 2012© B. Dyshlenko (series design), 2012© Juolukka Publishing House», 2012