Nina Sadur began her career as a playwright. During the latter years of perestroika Sadur's plays were circulated and staged initially at small studio theaters before they were added to the repertoire of more-established theaters. Her plays are powerful in their structure, their use of language, and their combination of folk beliefs and ritual with Soviet reality. By anticipating the prominence of ritual through her dramatic works of the 1990s, Sadur influenced the development of Russian theater aesthetics. She shares with conceptualists a concern for the power of language, which she undermines in her writings by pointing up the failure of language to convey meaning. Sadur's phantasmagoric worlds are not constructed through language but through characters, and as such they are far more tangible than linguistic constructs. Her thematic approach lies with the meaning of human existence in an open space and with the nature of evil. Sadur's...