Leonid Gabyshev - Odlian, or the air of freedom. A gift book in a leather cover.

"Odlian, or the Air of Freedom" is a novel about the fate of a teenager serving a sentence in an educational and labor colony.

Gabyshev has two gifts - storytelling and truth, one from nature, the other from man.

His narrative is about the zone. You start breathing the air of the zone from the first page and from the first chapters devoted to the free childhood of the hero. Everything is a zone here, from birth. Grandfather is a peasant, father is a police chief, grandson is a convict. The center and heart of the story is a colony for minors of the same age. Odlian - this name will become a household name, I'm sure. These are the childhood years of a peasant grandson who finds freedom in the zone, comprehending its meaning, which too many of us who have lived in freedom have no idea about.

The novel is a cruel, terrible narrative, a requiem, a lament for a ruined life and destiny being destroyed before our eyes.

It is also important that time is not removed from us, we still remember it well. This is the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the country was sinking into an ever deeper sleep.