Work at first planned as a novelette, it has gotten its epic swing as the first sentence of the draft has been transcribed for a piece of over 30 pages. As the author says ? yes, I write too much. When the subject grabs you firmly by the throat ? what do you do? You sink in. What? Are you going to artificially make it short? No, you go by your natural rhythm. Two years of work resulted with a novel, in which tightly interlaced political, religious, cultural and economic plots of ice-frozen tsar?s Russia constitute a colorful background for a story filled with historical deliberations of many characters, psychological games played by two protagonists and typically for the author excellent digressive observations. A peculiar inventor and the Polish Siberian partisans, a pomp of logic and mathematics of characters, shame theory and friendship theory, Polish businessmen and Tungus shamans, investigation intrigue and a real romance (which wasn?t there). Ice hang-outs and cold-iron parlors, black physics and a Siberian tale, friendship, death and betrayal. Life as a particular form of a window pane frozen flower. A thousand paged Opus Magnum which has divided Jacek Dukaj?s enthusiasts into the Ice fraction and Other Songs fraction.

Wydawnictwo Literackie • Kraków 2007 • 1054 pages • ISBN 978 83 08-03985-4