Trio for a Quartet

This book is about the oddities of love—about the strange forms it can take, whether it turns into a triangle that no theorem can contain (in which Masha, Mitya, and Volodya find themselves in the novel “Trio for a Quartet”), or whether it turns into parallel lines that refuse to meet.

The novel’s heroes are not young anymore, but love catches up with those too, even with those who ought to be rocking their great-grandchildren, as in the story “The Best Part for Second Lead.”

The heroes do not know what capricious fate will throw at them on every new page, and together with the readers they discover touching, dramatic, sometimes puzzling situations into which a great human feeling leads them. Sometimes they stop just short of a small but significant step that would cross the line beyond which begins that very, longed-for, real life. However, the author does not moralize—the narration is free and ironic. So, following Pushkin’s advice, Elena Kholmogorova, turning to the eternal theme, invites us to “talk about the oddities of love.”