Grigori G. Nikulin

The main character of this one - Antonina - a wife, mother, mistress of the house, wakes up after an unusually bright dream and realizes that she has not lived her whole life as she wanted. There were strangers around, people she didn't like, and it wasn't her life at all. She realizes this so clearly that even at the funeral of her own husband, Antonina does not cry, is not killed, and it seems that this death does not concern her at all. And this is despite the fact that my husband lived a long and prosperous life...

One day in the life of a modern St. Petersburg woman, a woman of post-Balzac age, with whom something is happening. Either a spiritual crisis or a momentary obsession...

Set around the Volga river, the story begins around 1900, when Russian peasants are let free and allowed to own their farmlands. But soon they suffer from losses during the 1917 Russian Revolution and the following Civil War. Then, the major national catastrophe is started by Stalin: his communist government kills millions of farmers and steals all their food supplies, causing the longest and deadliest famine all over central Russia during the 1920s and 1930s.