This is a dive into post-war Russia, and a coming-of-age tale narrated from the perspective of the protagonist, a young girl growing into a woman who makes her (painful) choices from the reality around her. She, born and raised in a provincial town and in a regime-devote family, decides to go study acting in Moscow, and builds a career in the profession. She never bought into the ideology of the Soviet all-encompassing state, but her disdain of the condition she lives in grows more and more with passing time and with her discovering how things really work under the facade of greatness and order the state instills in its propaganda. It is an interesting novel because it makes you realise, for those of us who haven't experienced living under a dictatorship at least, how the gradual destruction of free thinking accompanied by a self-reinforcing sea of lies can be put in act. I found the many descriptive passages a bit affected when they were probably meant as lyrical, but all in all the text is fluid and the story quite captivating. It also leaves lots of room for thought.