The hero of Alexander Ilichevsky’s new novel “Orphics”—a twenty-year-old young man—dramatically changes his life instead of going to study at an American university. A chance meeting with a young woman, a femme fatale, shatters his plans and pulls him into the wild, crazy atmosphere of the early 1990s. Obsessed with the desire to save his friend from an enormous debt, he enters risky relationships, the climax of which becomes “Russian roulette” at the Pasвков House—a game with death…