At the core of A Russian Mother lies the profound ambivalence of two people who are chillingly remote yet obsessively attached. This painful symbiosis between a mother and son takes shape in fragments, as the narrative jumps back and forth in time until the late1970s. The narrator provides the psychological threads that unify the haphazard chronology, the chaotic uprootings, and the conflicting emotions as he tries to come to terms with his mother-as blood relative and fictional character.