During the next month, they each visit Elena Aleksandrovna separately. Sasha doesn’t know what happens with Lara and Slava, but they walk around with a tome of Brothers Karamazov, just as she does. When she asks them about their rehearsals, they both say that they simply talked. At her rehearsals, she does more than talk. She draws the plan of the house where Grushenka lived, complete with the view from her window, all based on the descriptions in the novel and on her memories of her grandparents’ house in Ivanovo. By the end of that month, she knows not only her role from the beginning of the novel to its end, but also the complete novel itself, almost by heart. And what she can’t find in the novel, she creates: every event and every character, no matter how small, now has a story that precedes their appearance on the page. She knows every person’s routines and habits; she knows what they crave to eat and what hides behind the doors of their armoires. She sees their wrinkled foreheads and pursed lips; their hair, carefully arranged or disheveled and unwashed; their stooped shoulders, their straight backs, their striding or mincing steps. She knows what makes their hearts swell and their blood run cold.

The next three weeks go to researching hundred-year-old paintings and photographs from Elena Aleksandrovna’s collections and the archives of several Moscow libraries. They examine every piece of furniture and silverware, every hat and hairstyle, every necklace and scarf. No detail is too small. On their teacher’s order, Lara and Sasha spend evenings walking around the dorm with dinner plates balanced on their heads, their waists constricted by thick strips of rubber so that they can feel corsets from the previous century on their own skin. Every day it takes a few tries before they learn to align their necks and spines so that the plates don’t tilt, threatening to crash onto the hallway floor.

After they untie the rubber strips and release their waists, Lara and Sasha huddle on the bed in their room with the overhead light out and only a desk lamp throwing a cone of yellow light onto the floor. On these evenings, all kinds of things get released and spill out into the dusk. She sits and rants, and Lara sits and listens. Sasha is grateful to her friend for being there, for being quiet, for letting her purge the crippling, vomit-tasting poison of doubt and guilt.