1945, Leningrad. Iya suffers from post-concussion syndrome after fighting on the frontlines during the Siege. Now a nurse in a musty Leningrad hospital that heaves with death, she’s prone to sudden fits of paralysis; her muscles freeze, her voice is swallowed by a feeble croak, and her long alabaster body is no longer under her control. Inspired by Svetlana Alexievich’s book “The Unwomanly Face of War,” Balagov tells a brutal and achingly beautiful story about two women who grow so desperate for any kind of personal agency that they start using each other to answer the unsolvable arithmetic of life and death.
