Mariya Kapitskaya

Это было прошлым летом

On a holiday eve, everyone, especially one tired and chilly, does so need at least one living soul at one's side: it is bad to meet a holiday alone with oneself. Thus, on a New Year's Eve, the main characters meet, — a meeting of two solitudes. Chance brought two persons of disorderly lives together in a railway terminal.... kindling the hope for a normal, pure human life, the kind others have...

Sisin, a forty-year-old writer, gets on the train and goes out of town. In the car, he is surrounded by strange passengers, some of whom resemble famous Russian writers: Chekhov, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Kuprin... Surreal visions, hidden desires, fears, and anxieties arise in Sisin's imagination. Love, career, and life itself seem stupid and meaningless to him.

The dissolute way of life of Mariya Egorova, nicknamed "Magdalene", abruptly ends - her friend, driving her into debt and putting her "on the counter", taking her passport, through a pimp she knows, offers her to work as a prostitute. During the conversation, Mariya breaks the pimp's head, ends up in the police station, from where she escapes. Now bandits and the police are looking for her, and she urgently needs to find money to buy a passport and leave the city with her daughter.