The first book by the writer Andrey Georgievich Bitov (1937-2018), which has been lying in the author's portfolio for forty years due to circumstances beyond his control. "Bitov took a writer's gesture, allowed only to the classics: after he published fifty books during his literary life, he collected and published his "first book". This means that he took out of the basket and compiled the earliest pieces, student stories, which were not published and were not intended to be, thus revealing the zero page of his work (what was before the "Big Ball" and "Aptekarsky Island", with which Bitov begins for us). At the same time, in the same little book, he presented the beginnings of his own textology (a draft version of the famous story "The Idler") and some materials for his own biography, thereby acting in some way as his own researcher. The result was something carefully designed and very refined, a new work of the author from very old pieces, something that fits the current concept of an artifact " (S. G. Bocharov).