[2] Osipov's experiences in Tarusa influenced the stories, highlighting the miserable post-Soviet feeling that surrounded the town.

Part 2, "Kilometer 101: Essays", contains Osipov's autobiographical recounts of living in Tarusa, and the "anaesthetising greyness" of life in provincial Russia, as the Financial Times described it.

[4] In the opening essay, "My Native Land", Osipov lists the ailments facing the Russia people of "N—" (presumably Tarusa): general discontent and a sense of hopelessness, isolation from the community, alcoholism, familiarity with death, and a general "feeble spiritedness".

[5] In a review for Foreign Affairs, Maria Lipman reads the collection as existing at the crossroads of several "dilemmas"; of "a liberal facing an oppressive state", of an individual making "moral compromises" by staying in Russia and then emigrating.

[7] In a review for the Times Literary Supplement, Polly Jones writes that the book "demonstrates Osipov's preoccupation with the complex trajectories and emotions of migration and emigration," adding that such stories "are rarely presented in such straightforward, binary terms: many of [them] instead underscore the folly of imagining that life could be better anywhere else.