Beginning in present day St. Petersburg, this novel explores the landscape of 20th century Russian literature through imagined encounters with the great writers of Russia's literary past. With poet Marina Tsvetaeva as the guide, meet the ghosts of writers such as Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, Osip Mandelstam, and Joseph Brodsky, whose worlds are interspersed with original poems, new translations of Russian poems, and striking images of Stalinist propaganda. This book reconstructs the tragic lives of many Russian writers, often Jewish, during the long period of Soviet terror and re-establishes them at the heart of the European literary tradition.