The books are arranged in piles along his bed—a slab paved with bindings, reminiscent of a sarcophagus.

He is back in his old room, where he has not lived for several months. He had rented a space with his girlfriend, Tanya. But after the operation she called him. If he wanted to see her again, she said, he would first of all have to “work out his problems.” In plain terms, no more getting on the wrong side of the people who had nearly disemboweled him …

This expression, “work out your problems,” is currently in frequent use; it can cover anything from having to change a lightbulb to a pressing need to liquidate a competitor. Tanya does not want to encounter that hooded gang on her doorstep one day. “You know St. Petersburg holds the record for the number of murders. And by the way, I’ve already changed the lock …”

She is a young, beautiful woman, not prepared to die for the freedom of expression championed by the fly-by-night magazine Oleg works for. And he can understand her.

His return to the communal beehive helps him to take stock of the course Russia has now embarked on. Previously the apartment was lived in by people who were certainly of modest means but who all had a job or a pension. Among them, too, were artists who had come to take Leningrad by storm, divorced people hoping to find something better quite soon. Now social rejects are crowding in, the losers in the sifting out of the strong from the weak, the only way of life now in this new country. Their poverty can be seen from the laundry they hang out to dry, from the meals cooking on the stove.

Year five, following the fall of the Berlin Wall.

To be ranked among the defeated is unpleasant. He, too, has had his good years! Not an airline, but good jobs and therefore good salaries. During the first years of liberalization a simple cigarette salesman in a plywood kiosk became a “businessman” … Oleg has written radio plays, made short films, worked for a theater, even ventured into the field of selling used cars … And on Saturdays he filmed weddings: the emerging middle class needed to immortalize the brilliance of their family celebrations. From this nuptial merry-go-round he has moved on to making commissioned documentaries, tracing the rise of oligarchs. Always the same scenario: impoverished youth under the Soviets, first steps taken into the harsh world of business, the awakening of the entrepreneur of genius, and, at the end, a luxurious gilt-and-marble office, where this self-made man was telling his story … Some of these tycoons would be murdered shortly afterward (“I’m not in this for nothing,” Oleg joked). The times Russia was living through pulsated with a frenzy that was pathological. Fortunes were made in a matter of months and lost in a matter of hours. Seeing a man lying in a pool of blood out in the street was as commonplace an occurrence as stepping over a drunkard asleep on the sidewalk had been in the old days. On one occasion Oleg filmed a limousine, the gleaming symbol of a successful career. The next day all that was left of it was a pile of scrap iron with the smell of explosives hanging over it and the police gathering up what remained of its owner into plastic sacks.

He knew he was capable of adapting to this obstacle race. Changing jobs. Hardening his heart. Forgetting his dreams of cinema. Making the videos that gave him a living. And he lived well. He was able to rent fine premises, while still keeping his room in the communal apartment—“my junk room,” he called it. At one point he had two girlfriends, and, to crown it all, they looked like one another! In fact, they both looked like Lessya …

It was the death of his old teacher, Bassov, that gave him doubts about this new life. He pictured the old man having fallen over at the edge of a frozen pond—a body lying there as passersby skirted around it. The world made no sense if a man could disappear like that: without deserving an inquest into the causes of his death, without so much as a sigh being uttered, beneath the gray sky that heralded the spring.

After that encounter with Kozin he found it impossible to go back into the race. Decline shocks us more than death. Kozin choosing to let himself die slowly, in filth, in full view of the contemptuous looks of others, his long drowning in death, shook Oleg more than a sudden decease would have done …

He abandoned his oligarchs and one evening answered an advertisement: the magazine No Comment was looking for a photographer.

This magazine published only photographs with short captions. The pictures, presented in pairs, owed their impact to juxtaposition. The first one, for example, might show an old woman sitting in the snow, holding out her hand—the second, taken in the same street, a private town house where guests were stuffing themselves with caviar. The overcrowded dormitory at a poorhouse, pictured opposite the residence of a minister. Children in rags—and a schoolboy getting out of a luxury car accompanied by a bodyguard …

Oleg was under no illusions about the effect these contrasting pictures might have. But he was touched by the little team’s enthusiasm. The six journalists had faith, something lacking in this new country where the pressure to succeed forced people to adopt the grim rigidity of robots. He was familiar with the circles oligarchs moved in, which, for the editorial team, made him “our man in the world of the rich.” He did end up believing that their efforts might alert the crowds embarked on a wild stampede toward nothing.

Every day they received threats. Several times the magazine’s vehicle was torched. The response of the police was predictable: “You bring this trouble on yourselves. You’re lucky they haven’t shot at you.” This “they” implied a lot of people: each issue contained photographs aptly designed to displease the powerful.

The attack by the hooded men had not greatly surprised them. What was surprising—Oleg would think about this on his hospital bed—was the extremely natural aspect of this evil. Smashing, punching, and, if a woman attracts you, violating her. And, if an idiot gets in the way, sticking a knife in his guts, just to be rid of him. An unthinking brutality, almost devoid of any malice. “After all,” he said to himself, “a wolf tearing open a sheep’s throat doesn’t hate it.” This absence of hatred seemed more distressing than the violence itself.

“The struggle for survival reduces men to their animal nature.” He has often repeated this. Now he asks himself sharply, “But what can you offer them? What other life? What other goal?”

The question comes back to him one night, in response to the moaning of the old man with cancer. “What other life?” An image lights up in his mind, between memory and dream: a woman walking along beside tall trees, white with the first snow. A vision that truly does have the clarity of a goal. This beauty, he would like to say, but the notion is driven out by an even more vivid vision: a man walking through a clear night, amid fields. Carrying a violin under his arm …

Oleg is back in his old room, thinking about those moments as he rediscovers the piles of books, echoes of distant times. His screenplay, the filming, the journey to the Crimea. Twelve years … Wars, crises, revolutions, global disasters and his own petty disasters, breakups, separations, the wound still weeping in his stomach … And the steadfast beauty of that moment: a woman walking beside the sea beneath snow-covered trees.

The choice is simple: get rid of all these books, get back into the rat race. Or else … He opens a volume. The Seven Years’ War, Russia’s adversary is the Prussia of Frederick the Great, the Empress Elizabeth discovers Catherine has exchanged several letters with him. Is she a German spy? Count Shuvalov and Prince Trubetskoy, who are heading the investigation, succumb to the young princess’s charm. The author of the book claims that she received them together … Always this desire to couple Catherine with several males, to turn her into an animal. The same story was told in connection with the Zubov brothers—they were said to hurl themselves at her, both at the same time, of course.

He replaces the book on the tomb-like pile of printed matter. Tales of two kinds: some portraying a female in heat, others showing a mistress of political games. Not much choice: sex or the antics of court life … A cage!

He dreams of a volume buried somewhere in the depths of this sarcophagus of words—the tale of a life lived far away from this prisonlike existence.

He knows such a story does not exist. Create one? An inspiring plan. But what’s certain now is that it is impossible for him to go back—back into that world the books in the sarcophagus are talking about.

That same evening he counts his savings: 2,400,000 rubles, enough to keep going for three months or, rather, given the galloping inflation, six weeks. Sufficient time for an attempt to break the bars of the cage.