About the book: 2003 / Abstract from the publisher In the early twenties of the last century, a mysterious man appeared in the USSR - Baron Roberto Oros di Bartini. He became not only an outstanding designer and scientist, but also the secret mastermind of the Soviet space program. Sergei Pavlovich Korolev called Bartini his teacher. "The Red Baron" proved that time, like space, has three dimensions, and the most distant galaxies are just a stone's throw away. Bartini retrieved the library of Ivan the Terrible from the dungeon and largely determined the fate of his students - M. Bulgakov, V. Nabokov, A. Green, A. Tolstoy, A. Platonov, E. Shvarts, L. Lagin, A. Volkov, L. Leonov , I. Efremova, A. de Saint-Exupéry and other writers. It was Bartini who became the prototype of the most unusual characters - Woland, Drood, Khotgabych, Pinocchio and even the Little Prince. But the main secret of the “Soviet Saint-Germain” is encrypted in the novel “The Master and Margarita”. The book is not intended for the general reader. *** The title of this book sounds magically attractive to any fan of “The Master and Margarita”... The authors started from an article published (quite a long time ago) in “Technology for Youth” about tests in the 1930s of a secret Soviet “invisible aircraft” and ( the push was strong) reached such cryptohistorical depths that all the achievements of “Foucault’s Pendulum” were disgraced and humiliated. The key figure in this (and also, apparently, world) history (“Tonight there will be an interesting story at the Patriarch’s Ponds!”) was the scientist and designer Robert Ludwigovich Bartini, aka Baron Roberto Oros di Bartini. Among the Soviet (and not so Soviet) writers who, according to the authors, were probably influenced by this extraordinary man, were Alexei Tolstoy, Mikhail Bulgakov, Alexander Green, Yuri Olesha, Vladimir Nabokov, Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov, Valentin Kataev, Sigismund Krzhizhanovsky, Leonid Leonov (the list is incomplete), and later - Ivan Efremov, Arthur Clarke (!), Eremey Parnov and... Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. This assumption gives the authors a reason to consider almost the entire corpus of texts of these writers as a kind of single hypertext, united by an extensive set of common symbols and ciphers. And, of course, after accepting such a premise, Buzinovsky has no choice but to try to isolate these symbols and solve these codes... © Sergey Berezhnoy, April 2004.