Szarycz's book is a perceptive study of the dramatic change in the writings of Valentin Kataev, one of the most interesting of the establishment Soviet writers, whose creativity spanned the periods of literary modernism of the 1920s, the high Stalinist period of Socialist Realism, and the post-1953 Thaw. The topic of the book is precisely the writings of the latter period, in which Kataev breaks away from the rigid canons of Socialist Realism towards «lyrical prose,» blending the subjective world of the lyrical ego with the objective world of surrounding phenomena.
