During the month of September, like college students all over the country from Kaliningrad to Kamchatka, they pay for their free education by working on a collective farm, where there is a perpetual shortage of hands to harvest the vegetables planted in May. Every morning, they climb into a creaky bus and for eight hours bend over rows of potatoes, onions, and turnips, raking through the dirt soaked from recent rains in search of produce that hasn’t yet rotted in the ground. Sasha doesn’t know where all the collective farmers are, the workers who have tended to these crops they are now told to harvest, but as she lifts her head, all she sees are drama students up to their ankles in mud. Every day, practical as ever, Sveta stuffs the best-looking vegetables into a bag to take back and store in the bottom of the armoire in their dorm room. At the end of the month, they have a pile of food that will last them until New Year’s.

Sveta is inventive in other ways, too. She is a year older than Sasha and, in her own words, she has already seen life. She sends Lara, their third roommate, to buy a few meters of cheap upholstery fabric and instructs Sasha to sew them skirts with big pockets. “For crib sheets,” Sveta says. “For history and philosophy, when we have our first final exams in January.” With a blonde braid down to her waist, Sveta has the slight build and pure blue-eyed stare of an ingenue. Sasha had to look up the word ingenue in a French-Russian dictionary—“an innocent, unworldly young woman”—and she thought it was ironic that the real Sveta was the complete opposite of the Sveta she would portray onstage.

The only classes they would never dream of approaching in their devious skirts with crib-sheet pockets are the classes they came here for, the reason they left their homes and endured three brutal rounds of auditions. These are the classes of stage movement, dance, voice, and, the most frightening, the most important class of all—acting. Acting is sacred, and they all know that the first two years are when some of them will be expelled for what their dean calls “professional inadequacy,” or simply a lack of the acting gift.