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 thing - 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 substantively. The content of the project is 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. This means that the author has to deal with a completed process - this is the fundamental novelty of the proposed study. Only a completed process is available for study: today is the optimal time to analyze Russian culture, which is confirmed by the worldwide increased interest in it. Isn't the ultimate goal of any literature - biographical, in particular - to understand why it ended this way? Dmitry Bykov's new book is cruelly bitter, but at the same time so alive, so passionate and hot that doubt creeps in: does the author himself fully believe in its main postulate about the death of Russian culture?..