This book was conceived by the author as a textbook, but as he worked on it, it turned into a confession of a man who invested his life in a lost, but no less interesting, matter — the study of Russian culture. A sick product of a sick system, Russian culture is doomed to perish along with the system. Russian civilization, according to Dmitry Bykov, can still function for some time — institutionally or physically, but not in terms of content. The content of the project has been exhausted, it has come to a logical and inevitable self-destruction. That for which God tolerated Russia has completely left, left, or simply died out.