About the book: 2018 / Alexey Varlamov is a prose writer, philologist, author of several biographies of writers, as well as novels, including “The Mental Wolf.” Winner of the Alexander Solzhenitsyn Prize, the Big Book and the Student Booker awards. 1980. Instead of the promised communism in the USSR, there are Olympics, and no one believes in anything. Neither already - into Soviet power, nor yet - into its collapse. The main character of the novel “My Soul Pavel” is an exception. He believes. Naive and dreamy, an ideological Komsomol member, Pasha Nepomiluev comes to Moscow from a closed secret town, where idyllic descriptions of life from Soviet newspapers are reality. He miraculously enters the university, but instead of lectures he ends up at a “potato camp”, where intellectual senior students open his eyes to much of the life of a big country that he loves, but hardly knows. A novel of upbringing, a coming-of-age novel about the first encounter with real life, about the courage to question your beliefs and defend them to others.