"A poet in Russia is more than a poet" once stated Evgenii Evtushenko. The same can be said about Russian-speaking prose writers, due to the fact that their culture is literature centered. Roman Shorin is a bright representative of this word world. His creative work consists of short novels which look like philosophical blurbs on life.

But why this reading can be found so interesting? First of all, the writer prefers to stick to the main Anton Chekhov's rule – shortness is the talent's sister. However, unlike the short-story genius, Shorin takes a lot from Fyodor Dostoevsky, who literally dissected people's souls in his works. Our hero does the same, but Shorin prefers to make his narrator someone like Samuel Beckett's Molloy: the main character's monologue always leads the reader to some unexplored corners of their own consciousness.

Ineffable Feelings text is a wild mix not only of Beckettesque monologue but the German philosopher Gernot Böhme approach as well. Shorin takes a case and looks at it from his narrator's perspective: the impossibility of a random actress of making a clear definition of how it felt to sleep on the new bedsheets in a commercial video. This starting point makes Shorin's narrator quite obsessed with the ineffable feelings term the actress used in that video. The ineffable part of this phrase becomes some verbal illustration of Godot – for whom everybody was waiting, but nevertheless, he never came by and remained an ephemera construct in the reader's mind.

In the essay named 10,105 Signs with Spaces, the writer tries to unpack the phenomenon of how creative writing is usually judged these days – by the number of signs in the manuscript. As a matter of fact, this method gives us a precedent where creativity's criticism is based on secondary elements, which do not give any idea of how talented or not an author may be. This text highlights the problem all young and mid-career writers face once in a while – formal requirements of each publishing platform that sometimes drives them crazy due to the fact of how different each publishing house may be. However, Shorin also stresses that today's world, where almost everything is computer-based actually leads us to this environment of numbers.

All in all, every text Shorin produces has this unique atmosphere of intimate dialogue with its reader. The writer tries to uncover themes that may not seem to be on the surface of our everyday life, yet they still exist...