For the first time, an unknown novel by one of the brightest and most significant writers of the second half of the 20th century, Yuri Osipovich Dombrovsky (1909-1978), comes to the reader. This is a novel about love, about its incomprehensible laws, about difficult human destinies and characters, and is distinguished by its complex philosophy and unusual, innovative composition. It was believed that the text created by the writer in the settlement in the early 1950s was either lost after rehabilitation (Dombrowski sat for a total of ten years, not counting the first link to Alma-Ata in 1933), or destroyed. Fortunately, it turned out that all these years the novel was kept in the writer's archive.