This book of reflections present comments on the book by L. Ulitskaya – The Big Green Tent. The purpose of the commentary is to reveal the main idea of the novel – «What gives meaning to life, gives meaning to death». Comments lead the readers to the depths of author’s feelings and thoughts about time and about oneself. This is a fascinating journey «back to us as we were conceived», according to L. Ulitskaya. Bon voyage, dear readers.

The Big Green Tent epitomizes what we think of when we imagine the classic Russian novel. With epic breadth and intimate detail, Ludmila Ulitskaya’s remarkable work tells the story of three school friends who meet in Moscow in the 1950s and go on to embody the heroism, folly, compromise, and hope of the Soviet dissident experience. These three boys—an orphaned poet; a gifted, fragile pianist; and a budding photographer with a talent for collecting secrets—struggle to reach adulthood in a society where their heroes have been censored and exiled. Rich with love stories, intrigue, and a cast of dissenters and spies, The Big Green Tent offers a panoramic survey of life after Stalin and a dramatic investigation into the prospects for individual integrity in a society defined by the KGB. Each of the central characters seeks to transcend an oppressive regime through art, a love of Russian literature, and activism. And each of them ends up face-to-face with a secret police that is highly skilled at fomenting paranoia, division, and self-betrayal. A man and his wife each become collaborators, without the other knowing; an artist is chased into the woods, where he remains in hiding for four years; a researcher is forced to deem a patient insane, damning him to torture in a psychiatric ward. Ludmila Ulitskaya’s novel belongs to the tradition of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Pasternak: it is a work consumed with politics, love, and belief—and a revelation of life in dark times.

In this fantasy/allegory, Rogers retells the life of biblical character King David.

The idea of colliding two particle beams to fully exploit the energy of accelerated particles was first proposed by Rolf Wideröe, who in 1943 applied for a patent on the collider concept and was awarded the patent in 1953. The first three colliders — AdA in Italy, CBX in the US, and VEP-1 in the then Soviet Union — came to operation about 50 years ago in the mid-1960s. A number of other colliders followed.Over the past decades, colliders defined the energy frontier in particle physics. Different types of colliers — proton-proton, proton-antiproton, electron-positron, electron-proton, electron-ion and ion-ion colliders — have played complementary roles in fully mapping out the constituents and forces in the Standard Model (SM). We are now at a point where all predicted SM constituents of matter and forces have been found, and all the latest ones were found at colliders. Colliders also play a critical role in advancing beam physics, accelerator research and technology development. It is timely that RAST Volume 7 is dedicated to Colliders.