About this audiobook
Sisters Katya and Dasha Bulavina try to understand their personal futures within a society approaching profound upheaval. Relationships formed in the atmosphere of pre-war St Petersburg encounter the pressures of war and changing public expectations. Private uncertainty becomes inseparable from events that alter the conditions under which familiar choices once seemed possible.
Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy connects the sisters' experiences with a wider circle that includes Ivan Telegin and Vadim Roshchin. Conversations about art, love and responsibility reveal different ways of imagining a meaningful life. The distance between ideas expressed in relative security and actions demanded by circumstances becomes increasingly important.
The first novel of The Road to Calvary explores attachment, historical change and the vulnerability of expectations formed within an order that is losing its stability. Its movement between personal relationships and public events invites readers to follow how individuals begin to recognise the scale of a transformation they cannot yet fully understand.
