Hailed as one of the most significant writers in contemporary Russian literature, Sasha Sokolov (1943-) nevertheless remains one of its most hermetic. Despite a considerable scholarly interest in his work, no comprehensive book-length study has yet been published on Sokolov. With the focus on his three main texts, 'School for Fools', 'Between Dog and Wolf' and 'Palisandriia', this groundbreaking monograph is an exploration of Sokolov's aesthetics in which language is shown to embody reality, rather than express it. In her study Elena Kravchenko invites us to examine how language and art affect our perception of the real that, fading away into its reflections, finds its essence. Elena Kravchenko is an independent researcher, whose doctoral thesis (School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies, UCL) laid a foundation for this monograph.