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 begins with a simple exploratory exchange of letters between him and a faceless bureaucrat. 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.