The year is 1991, just before the collapse of the Soviet Union. A young Ukrainian poet in Moscow wakes up on a Saturday morning in the dormitories of the Gorky Higher Literary Institute. He sets out to meet a friend. His path is interrupted by drinking friends, a snake-catcher lover, a terrorist attack, and the KGB apparatus. The entire decay of the empire surrounds him from all sides and torments him. The day becomes complicated and washed away by more and more alcohol, and ends with a secret underground feast in the company of ghosts from the past. This is the first novel translated into Hebrew from the Ukrainian language. It describes with brazen grace the atmosphere of disintegration of those days, saturated with nationalism, anti-Semitism, and corruption, and combines the Ukrainian, minority, and downtrodden perspective on the ailing empire, just before the flood. The entertaining, picaresque novel, written immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union, is considered a milestone in contemporary Ukrainian literature. Most of all, it recalls the drinking satire "Moscow-Petushki" by Yerupiev, and Joyce's wandering odyssey "Ulysses". In his final work, although written in 1992, the author seems to have looked far into the present day. Yuri Andrukhovych, born in 1960, is one of the leading contemporary Ukrainian writers. He has so far published five novels, four books of poetry, two volumes of essays and essays, and has also translated into Ukrainian from English (Shakespeare), German (Rilke, Walser, von Kleist), Polish (Schulz), and Russian (Mandelstam, Pasternak). He is the winner of the Herder Prize, the Erich Maria Remarque Peace Prize, the Hannah Arendt Prize, and the Goethe Medal.