This is the first publication in English of a remarkable political allegory by the author of the acclaimed novel Sandro of Chegem. Although it was published in the West in Russian in 1982, this work has only recently been published in the Soviet Union, where this fable is seen as presaging the developments of Perestroika. Iskander brings his comic and narrative mastery to this story of the struggle between the manipulators and the manipulated, the rabbits and boa constrictors of a distant land, as they try to function in a failed utopia.