The Aftertaste of Passions and the Vicissitudes of an Imaginary Life

The union of two playwrights, their joint work in cinema, their love and tangled personal life… Everything is interrupted by the death of the wife, co-author, beloved woman. The man remains alive. With difficulty, he restores the pattern of his ruined life. He works. He tries to graft back the torn-off part of his soul, as one grafts an arm, a leg, or a heart. He invents a new love for himself, but the former one does not leave him. This is the external plot. The work's special interest, however, lies in the author's attempt to recreate the connection between the real world and that imaginary yet so vivid reality of film production created every day, which lays its own colors upon the characters of the novel—ordinary, neither the worst nor the best representatives of Russian cinema.