In The Marble Swan, three lines are intricately intertwined. The first is postwar childhood, painful family relationships, youth connected with the grimly caricatured philology department at Tartu University, ruled by Y. M. Lotman, and a story about friendship with Dovlatov and others… The second line is surrealist novellas born from real events. And the third is a special взгляд at those great works of literature that influenced the author most of all. Taken together, it is a portrait of an era and at the same time a portrait of a writer whose life is inevitably shaped by the laws of her art. The novel was a finalist for the Russian Booker, winner of the Zvezda magazine prize and the Estonian Cultural Endowment prize for 2014.