Beyond their acute depiction of life in the Soviet Union, Yuri Trifonov's novellas offer an extraordinarily rich literary encounter in the tradition of great nineteenth-century Russian writing. "Another Life" is the story of Olga, a woman suddenly widowed and attempting to grasp the memory of her brilliant, erratic husband and to understand their life together. Possessed with a passion for truth, able to appreciate how the past affects the present, he could not hope to flourish in a society where intrigue and moral compromise were the norm.<BR>A sharp, satirical portrait of an academic opportunist, "The House on the Embankment" is paradoxically laced with compassion and humor. Vadim Alexandrovich Glebov rises from shabby origins to become an apparatchik yet in so doing suffers his share of oppression - from society, from former friends, and, most significantly, from his total inability to make decisions.