A wonderful look at Soviet-era life as witnessed from the edge of the
empire, this book is comprised of letters, poems, and prose pieces that
together create a narrative. Through an entirely original form, Vladimir
Azarov, who trained to be an architect in Moscow during Stalin's Iron
Curtain years, begins with a simple exploratory exchange of letters
between him and a faceless bureaucrat during his days overseeing the
design and construction of the Soviet Embassy in the isolated republic
of Mongolia. What follows is an unfolding sequence that finds Azarov
meeting a remarkable Mongolian woman and later discovering the memoirs
of one of Russia's greatest poets, Anna Akhmatova, eventually revealing
an unlikely love story between the Mongolian woman and Akhmatova's son.
This enthralling account serves as both a cultural study and an
exploration of the human condition.