In this extremely funny satire on Soviet bureaucracy, the protagonist, a hapless author, attempts again and again to get his editors to accept his manuscript -- a novel with the title "Blue mountains or Tienshan." The story unfolds with the inevitability of a fairy tale in which a naive hero is painfully being initiated into the ways of the world, and while the would-be author wanders through the hallways of his publishers, we in turn learn a lot about the crumbling Soviet system and the inactivity of its bureaucratic functionaries. By Hollywood standards, the film may be slow and repetitive, but it is precisely the repetition of tragicomic situations that bring the film to the heights of a Beckettian absurdity. Even after the end of the Soviet Union a film that is worth while watching.