About the book: 1965 / Winter. Steppe. Far from the city, in the snow, the place Solyonaya Balka was lost. In the steppe rises the drilling rig of oil prospectors, the barracks in which they live. The team of drillers is led by a young master Alexey Kedrin - a man of creative “leaven”, boldly walking along the unexplored paths of the new, always associated with risk. The drillers received a difficult and complex task, but nothing stops them: neither the distance from their home, nor bitter frosts, nor multi-day snowstorms. They are achieving their goal - in the spring, a fountain of “black gold” will come out of the well they drilled... Matching Alexei Kedrin is Galina, the wife of the chief engineer of the drilling office, Nikita Guryev. And naturally, having met, Alexey and Galina fell in love with each other. Galina leaves Nikita - she cannot come to terms, no matter how hard she tries, with the position of “the wife of a responsible employee”, Guryev’s world is too narrow for her, Nikita’s love is selfish and becomes a spiritual fetter for Galina... About the harsh romance of the everyday life of subsoil explorers, about their sometimes very complex relationships, the search for the right “line” in life, Yuri Permyakov talks about in his story “When the Tulips Bloom.” Yuri Permyakov was born in 1933, grew up in the family of a drilling foreman, after ten years he worked in the Zhirnovsky oil field department of our region as a drilling worker, exploration operator oil wells, oil production operator. He knows the people he writes about well. In 1964 he graduated from the M. Gorky Literary Institute at the Union of Writers of the USSR. “When the Tulips Bloom” is the first story of the young author.