Тридцатая любовь Марины

Marina Alexeyeva is thirty years old and lives in Moscow. She is a dissident and a failed pianist. She meets Sergei Rumyantsev, who works at a factory. He serves as its Communist Party secretary. This meeting changes her life. A night with him leads her to embrace Soviet propaganda. She takes on the views of Soviet life under Andropov.

Vladimir Sorokin’s novel links her change to changes in language. It asks readers to trace the change in her voice. Her voice becomes that of a newspaper editorial.

The book first came out in Russia in 1995. Sorokin wrote it eleven years before that. This edition is a paperback.