About the book: 2015 / The main character of the novel, Kirill, a young aviation engineer, is forced to constantly ask himself the question: who is he? Almost an ancient hero, “the lord of lightning,” as he is already beginning to be called, a young genius - a successor to the traditions of Tupolev and Korolev - or a loser by the standards of modern Moscow and Russia?.. A loving and caring husband of his pregnant wife - or a man without a heart and conscience? .. A servant of a great cause - or a slacker from a dying Soviet office? Quotes from the book: Peering at his reflection, pale, not drawn, on top of which were the letters: “Do not lean” - and a tunnel ran with the scratches of the film strip, Kirill thought that what scared him most was... perhaps... uncertainty. He got lost when things started to go according to a script, as if written by someone else, and they started playing with him, like a mouse that doesn’t yet see the cat. One day he felt somehow... unpleasant when he suddenly noticed through the glass how, in a cramped and low, broken-down Honda, the operator’s shaggy knee was almost touching Yanya’s thin leg. I even wanted to point at the window and say: “Eh, mammoth, buy a wider tarantay... And wider shorts too.” (It seemed to him that he even saw a bolt, and all this - from the edge of the curb.) But anyone who would have previously said that Yana could cheat on him, he would have laughed in the face. Comrades, the basic concept for damping the sonic boom of the projected Tu-444, proposed today, is no good,” he wanted to say. Ignoring the overturned Tatishchev. – What kind of ideas are these? Absolutely “pop” (he wasn’t afraid to say so!). Chinese graduate students who came to us for internship defend their dissertations on them... That's the only thing they're good for. (Ideas, not graduate students, he wanted to explain casually, causing grins from the heads of departments who knew well what the level of the Chinese was). Here Kirill would take a break; the general would look at him with meaningless blue eyes, Chponiya would whisper with her neighbors, and Tatishchev would straighten up in aristocratic contempt. There was nothing sacred - in the total irony and banter generally inherent in KVN members. When a Ukrainian missile shot down a Russian Tu-154 over the Black Sea, they didn’t even risk going on stage with some kind of dialogue (“Does Ukraine have missiles?” - “Yes. Three. Now two.”) They just didn’t realize what was wrong with that... There was some scandal, of course. At least the jury made a face and lowered the points... Evening was falling. Despite the fact that it was getting dark now late, some kind of gloom was beginning to spread, a semblance of fog had accumulated in the lowlands, and many oncoming people had already turned on their sidelights: halogen lamps in foreign cars hung almost on the very bottom edge, and therefore their light ran along the asphalt like walking on water. One of the most difficult endings. And the tangle of roads, overpasses - as if someone had lashed the highway like a whip. In any case, Lyosha, who had matured after university in some kind of gop environment (now “Lyosha” suited him much better), brought into Kirill’s life the popular “peasant” joys that... Which he had previously spat on, and even now did not accept Very. A trip to the “sauna” could be considered the first “trial balloon”; Kirill treated offers to drink vodka with a shudder (literally: he was shaken by an attack of internal trembling, from somewhere from the esophagus to the shoulders, which for a second began to behave quite like a gypsy). Lyokha clicked the remote control and thoughtfully stopped at the night broadcast of RenTV, where naked bodies were spinning in a supposedly intriguing, but in reality - cheap - nebula: the actors were diligently balancing on the brink of pornography; Breasts splashed in self-tanning; where there was white lace underwear, the frame was overexposed. It was locked with a subway key. The flow of the hot Moscow Ring Road was thinning. Life ran, life ran.