Lair chronicle

Reality described in this book seems surreal or kafkian. A European, for example, may think it impossible for one apartment to simultaneously house groundbreaking scientists and prominent criminals, famous thespians and pick-pockets, great musicians and outstanding alcoholics. In the USSR, nonetheless, such commonality was, well, common. Events described in “The Den” present themselves as, at once, a mix of tragedy and comedy, vaudeville and court hearing, anecdote and epos, melodrama and farce, each giving way to the next smoothly or in a step-wise fashion, echoing the Soviet life, in comparison to which everything, even the most phantasmagoric of fantasies seems as boring as a fully-buttoned uniform