Word: frossia
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Dates: during 1944-1944
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...Retreat. Frossia found a job. She typed documents about transgressors of the new economic decrees: speculators in food, currency, timber, building material, raw chemicals, leather, steel, the theft of a sockful of rough amethysts in the Urals, the theft of 500 Ib. of raw glycerine. Her superiors lectured her: "The Party aims have been well defined by Comrade Bukharin. . . ." But she could not understand them. "Imperial or Soviet, she thought, we Russians will never change." Anna von Packen said, "Working for them? How can you? . . . You will not stand aloof from them. Therefore you are helping their ghastly revolution...
Reality. Soon Frossia had a lover. She found Michael on a park bench, weeping, starving, bareheaded, bitter, 22 years old, three years younger than herself. She fed him. "He had fed stooping over the food on the bench, eating very much in the manner of a ravenous animal. . . . Now he lifted his head, and Frossia saw a face as flawlessly chiseled as any she had ever imagined, skin and muscle clothing perfect bone work of chin, cheek and forehead. The straight thin nose, the large sherry-colored eyes ... all suggested breeding. Yet the mouth hung loosely, the eyes were twin...
When he slept Frossia watched him helplessly. "She stood, observing the grimy sunken cheeks, the matted hair, the black-rimmed nails, the bony, bared chest. She got hold of one emaciated hand, brought her ear closer to his face, called his name, but he did not hear her. His blackened mouth continued moving. She bent down and heard a child's broken, muted patter-the young man on Anna's sofa was back in the nursery, afraid of dark corners and curtained windows, and, listening, Frossia was ashamed of her earlier hardness...
Michael's end was sudden. He drifted away from Frossia, landed in a house of prostitution. When the police raided it soon after, Michael saw the procuress watching him steadily, "her heavily lidded eyes strangely noncommittal. It was early in the morning. She stood there in a light shawl and her dressing gown. . . ." She said, "Listen, there is very little food. . . . little room also. So many houses have been burnt down. There is little room for reptiles. The Zoological Gardens were closed down a long time...
...Frossia never establishes its heroine's conviction that Russia does not change. But in its long, discursive chapters lit with sudden clear characterizations, it does prove that Russian novels do not change very much...