Katya, Olga and Andrey are former classmates who grew up in an adventure-filled world in which they exposed spies, performed heroic deeds, awaited a brighter future, and dreamed of becoming a pioneer. Today they are successful, with prestigious jobs, expensive cars and large flats, but they lack a sense of fulfilment in their lives. Their childhood visions of being predestined for lofty goals seem to have evaporated with the end of the Soviet era. In a consumer society which yearns for stability, those dreams now seem at once naïve, tempting and paralyzing. Natalya Kudryashova’s semi-autobiographical debut presents an incisive account of the acute sense of futility felt by today’s generation of (not only Russian) thirty-somethings. The schizophrenia felt by people, whose entire country and meaning of life were abruptly transformed at the start of their adolescence, is expertly portrayed through the fluid shift between two timelines, offering a witty commentary on the era of Soviet propaganda and on today’s world of superfluous requirements.