Yuri Leving's book is built on "conjugations of distant ideas" and "strange rapprochements." Its heroes - Marshak, Nabokov and Mayakovsky, Nosov and Trifonov, Mandelstam and Dziga Vertov, as well as numerous illustrators of children's books - since it is the children's reading of "picture books" that forms the core of the author's narrative, and, in fact, that "education with optics," which is discussed here. The author presents a single space of culture, where the marginal - the features of literary menus or the styles of the characters' clothes - is considered in a context so wide and diverse that this alone provides the reader with a fascinating intellectual route.