Illustrated edition of the satirical story-fairy tale by Vasily Makarovich Shukshin (1929–1974), written in the last years of the writer’s life.

There is no rest for the Russian people. His soul always pulls him into the bright distance, his soul always hurts and asks for something, and until the third rooster, restless thoughts do not allow him to sleep. What's over the horizon? How to live correctly? What to believe? Where to find support? How to maintain dignity? The author thought about this and much more, and now we are thinking...

...Once upon a time the characters of Russian classical literature gathered in the same library - Onegin, Oblomov, poor Liza, someone from Chekhov - and decided that the hero of Russian fairy tales, Ivan the Fool, was not worthy to be among them. And they sent him to get a certificate that he was smart, and he had to do it before the third rooster, otherwise they would refuse him from the house and drive him out of the library. Fools have no place among literary aristocrats. It’s a shame for the heroes of the classics to stand on the same shelves with him.

Well, Ivan went... On the way, as expected, he met Baba Yaga and the Serpent Gorynych, the bear and the Sage, monks and devils, only they were all Although they are fabulous, they are somehow painfully familiar - to everyone who has lived in our country for the last years... ten? no, perhaps all forty... although, here seventy years ago everything was exactly the same... and a hundred years ago, they say, it wasn’t much different... In general, Ivan walked through the circles of the local, very recognizable Russian hell - funny , absurd and seemingly indestructible.