Abstract
<jats:p>In the foreword to the novel, Ulitskaia states her intention to allow the truth of literature to transcend the truth of mundane reality. The novel consists of 170 hybrid and fragmentary documents, dismissed by the author as inauthentic. Technically the novel is not narrated. The documents accumulate and consolidate a broad conception of Brother Daniel’s life. The author’s metanarrative (foreword, acknowledgments, six letters) complicates the structure. The two compositional texts create a fundamental counterpoint between the open-ended communication of the documents and the “author’s” personal reflections. Together they form a dialogue. Daniel’s life reflects a vast vista of human experience, those threads of connections between human beings and their world for which, as Ulitskaia writes, “literature is but the artistic comprehension.”</jats:p>