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The stories included in Dmitry Bykov's new collection "The Majority" create a fantastical and distorted world. One reality breaks through the other: "there are unmotivated rides in the night expresses and intercity buses, unidentified appointments, service to secret cults, collecting information for the benefit of non-existent or secret states. Stars, all the time, folding into unfamiliar configurations". The characters are mixed up here: Pobedonostsev quotes Bulgakov to Dostoyevsky, Harry Potter is invited to the NIICHAVO, and the Lady with the Dog strikes Gurov as practical and cynical. The times are tangled here: the past is replayed and unrecognizable in the new production, the present sprouts fictitious stories, and the future is tried to change by traveling backwards. Even geography revolts here: the living River Neglinka is tucked under the ground, and the dead rise from under the ground. And it is no longer possible to hide from life in art: it is poisoned by it and turned inside out.
Such is the world after February 24. But "paradise is the possibility of assuming that there is another life". It has yet to be found, and each story in "The Majority" is not only an expression of despair, but also a step toward finding that reality.