Everyone knows the effect of dealing with texts of the past as with venerable old people: here we love them, here we respect them, and there and there we tactfully turn a blind eye, because everyone understands everything. In Greenland - Green's fictional country - from any point of view one should not turn a blind eye to anything. It does not become obsolete, but only becomes closer and more modern. Greenland is a territory of freedom that has stood the test of time and all its reactants. It is not without reason that its business card is one of the main symbols of freedom in world culture: the sea. And it is not without reason that in "The Shining World" it is combined with another major symbol of freedom - flight. "The Shining World" by Alexander Grin - a program novel about freedom, published exactly one hundred years ago - in 1923, when freedom in Russia catastrophically disappeared. It is an acutely social text that is as relevant now as it was during the NEP, prodrazverstka and the formation of a new empire.