Poet Alexander Eremenko, who prepared the texts for the book in the early 1990s and again in the 2000s, compared the author of these unusual poems to the primitivist artists Henri Rousseau and Niko Pirosmani. The "naive" poet Pyotr Smirnov, who had only a primary education, lived in Moscow and worked as a loader. According to one researcher, we have before us a type of "visionary" author, existing "completely outside (and in a certain sense before) any modern or anti-modern artistic conventions." The publication includes the full version of the poem "Budouin Hills," chapters from an epic poem-tale dedicated to gods and kings, and appendices containing memoirs and critical reviews of Smirnov's poetry.