"The Blind Angel" is a novel about a blind musician and his guardian angel. I will not tell you exactly why the angel is blind, the reader, God willing, will find out from the text itself. I won't even tell you who the blind musician angel or the guardian angel is. © Yuz Aleshkovsky "The Blind Angel" — the last and, perhaps, the most significant work by Yuza Alyoshkovsky. A novel of farewell and forgiveness, a novel of confession, a novel of outcome. It remained unfinished. Alyoshkovsky wrote it for a long time, hard, leaving and returning, as if coming out of the stream of this thick, multi-layered prose and entering it again and again. It seems that the author deliberately did not complete it, moving away from the unfinished page and carefully leaving the book, as well as his earthly life. Fortunately for us, both happened for a long time. Like everything created by Aleshkovsky, this novel is defiantly paradoxical in its audacious, ear-splitting polyphony. Inside this alloy, the cries of newspaper slogans, the wheezing of spirituals, high—pitched Bang and low hits are swarming — the whole cacophony of a maddened city, through the streets of which, following the shadow of Dublin, A.I. begins his journey - a blind man, a musician, an Angel. Actually, two angels are traveling: one is a fully corporeal Angel Ivanovich with his guide dog; the other is a real angel who preserves the soul and blind body of the first. There is also Angelina, the third hypostasis of the heavenly hierarchy, recreated by Alyoshkovsky in his inimitable manner — virgo, muse, a bundle of ephemeral chastity and carnal temptation. There is also a diverse host of the fallen and overthrown, who have lost their wings, but, thanks to the author's compassion, they are still forgiven and quite humane in the novel. Emanuel Swedenborg, the great mystic, scientist and visionary, told the world about the structure of Paradise, where the map of the Heavenly City repeats the shape of an angel. In Alyoshkovsky's case, on the contrary, the city becomes a map of an angel, "filled with many eyes," and an angel—a man without eyes. But in bodily blindness, a blinding light of inner insight arises, and the novel, which masterfully and easily juggled genres and stylistic techniques along the way — from an adventurous detective story to a natural philosophy treatise, from an intense feuilleton to a Taoist parable — suddenly bursts into a fiery stream of tenderness and love — a burning, burning acid love to the very edge of pain, universal love for to everything in the world: "from an insignificant bug to a remote space." And yet, despite Alyoshkovsky's enthusiastic pantheism, this love is not unaddressed — it has a specific recipient, the one for all his life and for all his words "Angelina", who collected an unfinished manuscript from many fragments and placed this book in front of us. It's a very funny and very sad book. She fascinates with her music, the unique sound of the word, thanks to the instruments once created by Alyoshkovsky and unique to him, she is full of swashbuckling slang, pagan glossolalia, "woody whispers", bitter irony and caustic truth. And — wisdom. ""Read it!"The Angel commanded the prophet." We will read it too.   I. Yakulov is an unexpected joy. The last thing I expected was that you and I would see this book. Yuz wrote it for a long time, complaining that it was slow and difficult to go. To be honest, I thought that was how he abandoned her - it happens that way. Juz has been living in the best of all worlds for a long time, and suddenly the book is here, and we hear his voice again, which is unlike anyone else, full of bitter irony and wisdom. I can't call it anything but a miracle. A. Makarevich, I really miss the User. But I am reading his last, posthumous novel, and Yuz is alive. M.Baryshnikov