★From the winner of the Russian National Bestseller Award and the Big Book Award, the famous contemporary Russian novelist, biographer and poet Dmitry Bykov!
★This book won the international "Strugatsky" Science Fiction Literature Award!

The novel centers on a mysterious manuscript that accidentally falls into the hands of a young writer. In the real debate about the Don Civil War epic, the reader can easily understand the fate of the quiet Don. The protagonist is the outstanding writer Sherestov, and its prototype is Mikhail Sholokhov. Did he write his major works himself? Or is it stealing and altering someone else's writing, as jealous colleagues suspect? The author presents his own hypothesis, neither confirming nor disproving any existing theories, not telling how it happened or how it happened, but looking for meanings and patterns hidden on the surface in chains of events. The real secret of the novel turns out to be the writing itself, the dangerous and alluring element that changes lives.