“You only know what you allow me to play!” This sounds brazen, but if Sasha doesn’t say this now, she will never get another chance. She has to prove—to Vera, to her school, and to herself—that she can be more than just a heroine’s funny friend, or a rude saleswoman, or a clumsy cousin from the provinces.

She breathes in and out, just as Vera taught them. “I want to play Dostoyevsky’s Grushenka.” The beautiful, conflicted, and infinitely flawed femme fatale Grushenka in Brothers Karamazov. The tall, curvaceous twenty-two-year-old, a local seductress with feline movements, who is in love with the tempestuous Dmitri. A role that wouldn’t be assigned to her by anyone but her.

“It’s outside your emploi,” says Vera. She doesn’t have to say this, because Sasha already knows it. She is a character actress, and Grushenka is a seductive heroine. She can’t make Andrei write her even one love letter, while Grushenka has so many men buzzing around her that she has to swat them off like flies. But under the sheath of paralyzing fear that Vera may be right, there is a hot nerve of obsession that links Sasha to this woman, a character who seems to have risen from the pages of the novel and beckoned Sasha with her plump hand to embody her. She wants to feel her, to become her, to get into her skin.

She is also, as her mother often says, stubborn as a goat. “I don’t care about my emploi,” she says quietly, dizzy with her own audacity and disrespect. “I know Grushenka, and I want to play her.”

For a minute, Vera considers her silently, exhaling rings of smoke. Her face is an impenetrable mask, and Sasha doesn’t know what she sees.

“As you wish, then,” she says finally. “But you will regret this. Maybe for the rest of your life.”

She doesn’t tell Sergey about the Grushenka battle with the acting department of her school because she suspects that he would agree with her mentors. The person she wants to tell about Grushenka is Andrei, someone who knows the viral labyrinth of small-town gossip and passion unhampered by reason, the fabric of Brothers Karamazov set in a small town not unlike Ivanovo. Someone who is familiar with the fiery temper and injured pride Dostoyevsky was so fond of dredging out of his characters. Someone who has infected her with the constant longing of toska and fits of senseless gazing into the distance that Sveta berates her for, as her mother would if Sasha were ever to open up to her about Andrei, or anything else.

But is it possible that all this brooding about provinces and Dostoyevsky is nothing more than a distraction? Is she in such desperate need of Andrei simply because he has placed himself out of her reach, having exited the stage?