The character of the short novel, Stepan Košelev, a conformist born, is located opposite the junction between the old and the new brought by the October Revolution. Lifestyle swept away by historical events is a thing which, with its nostalgic notes highlights the inaccettibilità of this life in the Soviet capital. The longed-for escape from the present it is offered the possibility of a holiday in Melanzania, a small town at the center of Ukraine, but the values ​​that have existed for centuries in this "magic circle" bring fear to our hero, and he will flee from back from paradise of the past, as had already fled the hero of dead Souls, Chichikov, he created eighty years earlier by another Ukrainian writer Nikolai Gogol who 'discovered in his mediocrity. brilliant scenes, comic situations, legendary landscapes accompany our "Don Giovanni provincial" surrounded by a classic text forgotten since his time.

Note biobibliografica

Sergej Zajaickij (1893-1930), writer, poet, playwright and translator, was born in Moscow, it was in 1921 a permanent member of the section of the State Theatre Academy of Artistic Sciences. In 1926 he published his first novel The beauty island Ljulju (s Krasavica ostrova Ljulju), which is followed by: Melanzania (Baklažany, 1927) and The Life of Stepan Alexandrovich Lososinov (Žiznieopisanie Stepana Aleksandroviča Lososinova, 1928). The themes of these works denote an inner search for the meaning of life in a transitional time of the Russian-Soviet history, a very common research in the literature of the twenties, which brings him closer to the classics of those years as a satire M. Bulgakov (which was a friend), Ju. Olesa, M. Zoshchenko, Il'f and Petrov and V. Kataev. These themes are explored through a complex reconstruction of the mosaic of the new company, made up of light and shadow, through tragic and comic situations. Zajaickij working in a feverish state, almost warning that would have been little to live: in fact die in 1930 in Feodosia, tuberculosis, only thirty-seven.