In this autobiographical novel, the author moves among the dead poets of Stalin's Russia with the poet Marina Tsvetaeva, mingling with the ghosts of writers such as Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, Osip Mandelstam and Joseph Brodsky. The author, herself of Russian descent, reconstructs the lives and fates of Russian, often Jewish, writers during the long age of Soviet terror, re-establishing them at the heart of the European tradition.