Part One: Chapters I through III Summary

Kira Argounova arrives at Petrograd in 1922 on the "threshold of a box car" because there were not enough seats in the passenger cars. She is eighteen years old and is accompanied by her mother, Galina, her father Alexander, and her twenty-eight-year-old sister, Lydia. They lived in Petrograd prior to the revolution but eventually fled the war. When they get to the city, they go to the home of Galina's sister and her family. Maria Petrovna was once beautiful but is now just another over-worked, under-fed woman with a family to worry over. Her husband, Vasili, has refused to become part of the revolution and the family is barely getting by. Their son, Victor, is an engineering student at the Technology Institute. Their daughter, Irina, is an art student. They have a younger child...