The novel 'Darkness Falls on the Old Steps,' recognized as the best work of the 2000s (winner of the Russian Booker Prize of the Decade, 2011), is based on the author's family history. Alexander Pavlovich Chudakov, one of the leading Russian philologists of the 20th century, grew up in an intelligentsia family, thrown by fate to the edge of the world—to Shchuchinsk, a city of exiles on the border of Russia and Kazakhstan. In the harsh post-war years, amid the constant threat of new repressions and the lack of basic necessities, the protagonist's family managed not only to survive: like new Robinson Crusoe characters, they are rebuilding a lost civilization. Despite everything, they managed not to become embittered and remained true to their roots.