Her character, Lyubasha, smolders with anguish and anger. She begs the man she loves, the man who has already laid eyes on someone else, not to abandon her, not to crush her life. Night and day, she thinks of him. Night and day, only him, she sings. Lyubasha, short for Lyubov, love. She is despondent, feverish, losing hope, as the Bolshoi orchestra echoes from a tape recorder with music as restless as her mood. Lyubasha is so desperate to keep her lover that she decides to buy poison to exile her rival from life. Poison that will extinguish her rival’s eyes, drain color from her cheeks, make her hair fall out, strand by strand; poison that will bring her lover back. “I will give you everything I have, all my pearls and all my precious stones.” She sings Rimsky-Korsakov’s lines to the chemist who has promised the deadly potion. “And if that’s not enough, I’ll borrow or steal. I’m not afraid of servitude or debt.” The orchestra reverberates in heavy chords throbbing with a premonition of tragedy. But the chemist doesn’t want her necklaces or her rings. He wants only her honor. Her honor she has already given to the man who is about to leave her.

“Night and day,” she sings, “I think of him. I have forgotten my father and my mother for him,” she laments, holding the procured poison, shadowing the harmonies that pulse with dread. “I have abandoned all my family. I’ve given him everything I have. And now he wants to leave me for a girl whose eyes are brighter, whose braids are longer. A girl who doesn’t love him, who is innocent of his desire, who is betrothed to someone else.” A French horn enters with a throaty solo. “What have I come to?” cries Lyubasha, brokenhearted, bitter, inconsolable, the violins of the orchestra weeping from the Bolshoi Theatre tape.

They are almost done with the outdoor shots, and at the end of this week, after a banquet thrown by the local government office, the film crew will pack up and take the train to Riga.

This is Sasha’s first banquet, and she has been looking forward to it for weeks. Back in drama school, when they have extra money, Sveta and her other classmates mark the end of exams at Café Leningradskoe, where they pool their rubles together for a bottle of wine and a few cheap zakuski, but she has never been to a celebration that is designed to honor artists. The local Communist Party Committee has invited them all—the actors and the crew—to the biggest restaurant in Suzdal, Bely Lebed, or the White Swan.