The Verification Bureau

Alexander Arkhangelsky is a prose writer, TV host, and publicist. He is the author of books including “The Museum of the Revolution,” “The Price of Severing,” “1962. A Message to Timofey,” and others. In his fiction, the history of individual characters always unfolds against familiar markers of the time—whether it’s the past or the political games of the present.

The year is 1980. A mysterious telegram forces graduate student Aleksey Nogovitsyn to return from a labor camp. The novel’s action takes only nine days, and in that short span everything fits: a love story with an intelligent and harsh girl, Muse; religious doubts; watching banned films; and interrogations by the KGB. Everything that happens to the hero is not accidental. Someone is testing his mettle. And as the backdrop there is splendid yet stifling Olympic Moscow—apartments, streets, commuter trains, lecture halls at Moscow State University, farewells to Vysotsky, and the Luzhniki.