Back to Moscow

Months after his arrival in Moscow, doctoral student Martin hasn't written a word of his thesis on the heroines of the Russian classics because, for him and his expat friends, the cheap, bright lure of nightclubs, vodka and real women is predictably hard to resist. It's the early 2000s and the city is storming into the 21st century - the grim old Soviet certainties are fading as money and an assertive political elite rise to power. Martin finds himself torn between opposing sensibilities on the one hand, the limpid appeal of Lena, and her insistence on the Mysterious Russian Soul; on the other, that of his research supervisor Lyudmila Aleksandrovna, diligent, serious, caught in the shadow of a Soviet past.