In the first book, Winter in the Country, Azarov imagines the enormous
presence of the great poet, Pushkin, and his influence on the
development of the modern Russian psyche. In On "The Death of Ivan
Ilyich" he imagines himself exchanging personalities with Tolstoy's
great character, Ivan Ilyich, who suffered and died from a terminal
illness. In doing so, he enlarges his own personal experience by giving
the death of a close friend a mythic dimension. In the third book, An
Atomic Cake, he explores a Moscow world of wild contradictions, surreal
social hysteria, and periods of massive malaise, all occurring under the
cloud of atomic bomb testing. This is when he met a passionate computer
specialist whose father had witnessed the American atomic testing at
Bikini Atoll. Together, trying to make sense of such a world, they
talked, imagining into existence the spirit of Rita Hayworth as she rode
on the side of the bomb in her negligée.