The new book by Tatyana Moskvina could probably have been titled the way James Joyce’s novel is titled: “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” But Moskvina is a proud and willful writer who is alien to postmodern games and dubious borrowings. “The Life of a Soviet Girl” is, above all, her self-portrait against an unremarkable Leningrad backdrop of the 1960s–80s—rendered with that relentless meticulousness that reveals the author as a devoted follower of the Russian realist school, a subtle psychologist, and a painstaking researcher of the vanishing Soviet nature. From a multitude of funny and sad stories, precise observations, and honest recollections is formed the Book of Life—one you can’t put down…