The first volume of the most famous French novel of the 20th century was published over a hundred years ago, in November 1913. The novel was called 'Towards Swann', and its author Marcel Proust did not yet suspect that his offspring would grow into a cycle 'In Search of Lost Time', on which the writer would work until the last hours of his life. The reader will have to evaluate the second novel of the cycle 'Under the shadow of maidens crowned with flowers' in a brilliant translation by Elena Baevskaya, which refutes the sadly established opinion that Proust is a respectable, intellectual, but boring author.