The Interlinear: The Life of Lilianna Lungina as Told by Her in Oleg Dorman's Film

This isn’t quite a typical audiobook. It is based on Lilianna Zinovievna Lungina’s story about her life, which viewers first heard in the multi-part documentary “The Understudy” (Podstrochniк). Then a book was published—a transcript of this story to which we added fragments that didn’t make it into the film, so the book became larger by almost a third.

Over fifteen years, the book went through many reprints, and we were repeatedly asked to release it in audio format. Unfortunately, the fragments that didn’t make it into the film are mostly of poor technical quality. That’s the kind of situation that the film was made in. Also, part of those fragments is, sadly, completely lost. We could have asked the actress to read the book from start to finish, but it seemed pointless—after all, the author’s living voice had been preserved. And we kept not releasing audiobooks, while the stream of requests never stopped. It even grew. As it turns out, many people don’t read today—they listen. And it turns out that, right now, many people need Lungina’s words. So we decided. The missing parts of the story are read by Oleg Dorman. Other fragments were restored by sound engineers: please forgive that the technical quality of these recordings is a bit worse. And finally, we added to the audiobook what didn’t make it into either the film or the paper version—so this is the most complete edition of “The Understudy.”