18:3). Natalia Gvelesiani – My Little Soviet Union Novel The novel depicts the process of the heroine’s spiritual and psychological growth, unfolding in parallel with the aging and degradation of the Soviet Union during the last decade of its existence. This journey culminates in the heroine discovering her own “little Soviet Union” within herself — a kind of Noah’s Ark, a spiritual-existential space where everything most valuable is preserved, everything she has synthesized from the spiritual cultures of the greater Soviet Union, Russia, Georgia, and the world. But this is far from all. Running as an underlying theme — through the novel’s symbolism and its associative imagery — is the idea of primordial Childhood as the way the Soul exists in the evangelical sense (“Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven” (Matt. 18:3)). Most people, the author suggests, lose the memory of this Childhood as early as infancy, yet it can be synthesized — which is what the heroine attempts to do, both consciously and unconsciously. The novel also offers new approaches to depicting the historical past. The novel was first published in a significantly abridged form in the magazine *Neva* (issue 12, 2013). Later, a complete edition appeared at Ripol Classic Publishing House (2016, Moscow). org/0009-0006-7898-9156 DOI: 10. 5281/zenodo. 17749247 https://doi. org/10. 5281/zenodo. 17749247 Creative Commons Attribution–ShareAlike 4. 0 International (CC BY-SA 4. 0).