DAY EQUALS NIGHT

A barrage of digressions and references to her country’s classic authors (mainly Pushkin, but also Tolstoy, Bely, Tsvetaeva, et al.) add minimal—and much-needed—color and life to this otherwise wan tale of adultery and boredom among Moscow’s contemporary Bohemians. Neurasthenic Sana leaves her phlegmatic husband Avvakum for a fling with slinky Armenian poet Otmafeian; gets pregnant; returns to the indifferent Avvakum. That’s about it, in a first novel whose supposedly scandalous opening scene is so swaddled in crisscrossing literary allusions that it’s impossible to be sure who’s doing what, and with what, to whom.