My sgoreli Notr-Dam [We Burned Out Notre Dame]

What do Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy, a little French immigrant, the current president of Russia, a famous cartoonist and the Devil himself, have in common? The answer is unexpected: Notre Dame Cathedral. For some, the symbol of faith, for some, the view from a tourist postcard is Notre Dame for everyone. That is why, when a fire broke out there in April 2019, millions of people experienced it as a personal tragedy and followed the cathedral's death in real time. In Ivan Chekalov's debut novel, Notre-Dame Cathedral serves as a point of intersection of various destinies. It combines high tragedy and black humor, grotesque and irony. Before the reader is an architectural novel: in it, each of the heroes is a part of the cathedral. Someone got a spire, someone a transept, and someone is destined to climb the altar. 'Ivan Chekalov, in my opinion, is the most talented young (even, frankly, green) Russian writer of our time. There can be a lot of complaints about his first novel, and that's okay