Anastasia Volodina entered our literary space last year with the "Protagonist", somehow naturally becoming part of a picture in which the niche of an academic novel is of the level at which she can conduct a conversation: at the same time fascinating-action and "soulfulness" accessible to the reader looking for a book to have fun-to distract; and at the same time at the same time, exquisitely complex in structure, with the inclusion of dramatic fragments, with many references to the media and cultural spheres, with a powerful philosophical subtext - this niche turned out to be vacant.
The "part of the picture" is the debut of Asi Volodina, structurally simpler than the "Protagonist", there are fewer characters and points of view in it, and the school texture itself assumes less ethereality and more mundanity than the academic one. The novel was written long before today, although the action was moved to 23-24 years. Here you can simultaneously say "How she guessed everything!" and play Stanislavsky. Well. at least because in today's conditions, the principled position of a member of the election commission is fraught with no longer bossy anger and ostracism of colleagues, but a very real term.
However, this prose has another important feature, despite the complexity and seeming hopelessness of the situations in which its characters fall, the author purposefully leads them from the traditional Russian Dostoevsky hysteria to reasonable Middle European behavior, which has long developed a canon of algorithms for breaking dead ends. And leads to hope in the final, even if they are pretty battered.