Release Message:  The narrator rides to ancient Greece on a hippogriff, hoping to discover what aspects of life and character made it possible for the ancients to be great military leaders and rulers of peoples.

Description:  It has been called the first original Russian science fiction novel and the first novel to use time travel. The narrator rides to ancient Greece on a hippogriff, hoping to discover what aspects of life and character made it possible for the ancients to be great military leaders and rulers of peoples. ("Kalimeros" is a Greek equivalent of Buonaparte, the original family name of Napoleon I; Veltman probably got the idea for this kind of wordplay from Victor Hugo's 1828 poem "Bounaberdi".[17]) He abducts the Pythia; finds himself in the camp of Philip of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great; and meets Aristotle in Athens. He then takes a trip with Alexander in which he mocks pagan rites and tries to pay for sacred writings with a 19th-century assignat. In the end he concludes that people of all times and places are the same, and it is the laws of history that can turn them into heroes; the author illustrates this by remarking that Alexander's profile reminds him of a Bessarabian stationmaster. Having bid farewell to Alexander, the protagonist returns to his own century on his "time machine".