A true artist can do anything. A copy of Velazquez, Rembrandt, Salvador Dali - please! He knows it all, he can do everything. But he paints his paintings in his own way. This is why he worked for many years, studying the handwriting and styles of other masters, so that he could then speak in his own voice, unlike anyone else. But in him, in this voice, is all the experience of his great predecessors. “The Hat” was not written by Aleshkovsky. Before us is the story of a modern, still Russian, American. A kind of magical transformation, like one of the heroes of his story. Which looks like an anecdote, a fiction, but you want to meet and ask the author - maybe all this really happened? In which there is also Chekhov, but already Jack London, O’Henry... And this is Aleshkovsky. Who called his unexpected “Hat” a trifle, a trifle... A rare, our, domestic product on American soil...