Sasha returns to the Vakhtangov Drama School in January, with full credit for all the courses she missed during the fall semester. In a year and a half, she has learned to observe. She has learned to watch what people do, how they move, and how they speak, how they squint their eyes, tighten their jaws, and knead their hands. She remembers every character she sees and every emotion she feels and stores them in a little box inside her, like photos in an album, where they will wait until she will need to pull them out for a role. She has also learned about heartbreak, thanks to Andrei and Rimsky-Korsakov, the opera composer.

In acting classes, they have moved to scenes. Yet they rarely see themselves onstage the way their acting teachers see them, and their stage personalities don’t even hint at their real ones. Why does the most stunning woman in their class, Zhanna, with raven-wing eyebrows over dark-blue eyes, become average and boring onstage, while her roommate Lara, quiet and unnoticed in life, suddenly grows ten centimeters taller, her face illuminated from within? “Stage charm,” their teacher Vera says, the term she has just introduced in their new class, Manners.

“You don’t lose your stage charm when you’re angry,” Vera tells Sasha. “You have a rare quality: your charm is in your anger.”

Of course, Sasha doesn’t want to hear this. And who would? She wants her charm to be in her heroism and beauty, not her anger. She wants to play tragic lovers, not character sidekicks and irate bullies. They all do. But Vera stands in front of their class, her fingers firmly wrapped around a cigarette, letting them know the rules: “Next year, when you are allowed to choose your own scenes, you can play whatever characters you like, but right now, be so kind as to play the roles you are assigned and work within the emploi we see you in.” She flicks off the ash at the new word emploi, the role archetype. Their school has told them what their archetypes are from now on: Sveta is an ingenue, Zhanna is a Soviet heroine, and Sasha is a character role catchall: a funny klutz, a peasant bully, or a heroine’s sharp-elbowed friend.