Creativity and compromise go head to head in Irina Ratushinskaya's novel, set in pre-Gorbachev Moscow. A renowned writer dies in fear of KGB pursuit, and immediately a hunt starts for a dissident manuscript he is known to have written. First Anton Nikolin, a children's storyteller, then Dima, a young student, are implicated in the search, which inevitably unearths more supposed traitors to the Soviet cause than it set out to find.
The terrifyingly ridiculous manner in which people implicate themselves and others has been explored in Russian fiction to good effect before - in Bulgakhov's The Master and Margarita, to name but one example - but Ratushinskaya's novel cleverly marks out its own territory. By placing her characters in the claustrophobic world of the Union of Writers, she is able to examine what happens to artistic vision when faced with censorship. But as the Moscow society she depicts is almost self-regulatory, and so great the fear of imprisonment, there are interesting parallels to be drawn with the restrictions imposed by creativity itself, or rather by the fear of its absence.
The second way in which Ratushinskaya's novel avoids the narrowness of the political tract is in the way it gives as much fictional texture to Filip Savich, head of the KGB, and to his agents - many of whom are writers themselves - as it does to the besieged and innocent Nikolin. Nobody's motives remain clear-cut in this lively second novel, and nobody is entirely without saving graces; a subtlety made all the more remarkable by the fact that Ratushinskaya was herself sentenced to seven years' imprisonment for expressing "anti-Soviet agitation" in her verse.