Ten years ago, a snowstorm prevented Doctor Garin from reaching the village of Dolgoe and vaccinating its inhabitants against a Bolivian virus that turns people into zombies. The doctor miraculously avoided freezing to death in the endless snowy steppe, only to return to a post-apocalyptic world where his patients will be the funniest and most helpless creatures on Earth, former leaders of world powers. This world, where watches are carved from stone and iPhones from wood, is an encyclopedia of Sorokin's dystopia, confidently imbuing the future with features of the dark past. Despite the usual irony and parodic references to the Russian prose canon, "Doctor Garin" is distinguished by a noticeably new level of anxiety: the gulag of swamp blackies, a byproduct of the Soviet experiment, turns out to be more terrifying than the atomic bomb. Another radical innovation is the piercing lyricism. In the ruins of a shattered universe, an old-fashioned doctor will meet, lose, and regain his one true love, only to treat her for the rest of his days.