Natalya Vorobyova

Viktor is a highly successful and wealthy actor. For years, he has sought distraction from his inner poverty through his relationships with women. In this movie, his marriage to an emotionally overwrought woman comes under strain when he hops into bed with a teen-aged adorer. However, this isn't the relationship his wife should worry about. The actor has a far more sinister relationship with a plain, hard-faced woman who expresses her deep contempt for the actor. The more she does so, the more he loves her; the more he loves her, the more contempt she shows. Eventually, he comes to see that these relationships are mirrors of his inner life -- which arouses him to despair, as he cannot bear to own up to this.

The author of The Kolyma Stories and many other works spent 17 years in the terrible GULAG camps on Kolyma. The term that Varlam Tikhonovich received in 1929 was for distributing Lenin's letter to the congress, in which he criticized Stalin. Nowadays, this letter is called the "testament of Lenin"…