Widely regarded as a major writer of his generation, Yuri Trifonov tolerated attack and admiration in the Soviet Union. His novellas are celebrated as being in the tradition of great nineteenth-century Russian writing. In Another Life, a woman suddenly widowed attempts to grasp the memory of her brilliant, erratic husband, and to understand their life together. The House on the Embankment is the story of an academic opportunist who rises to apparatchik but suffers the oppression of society, friends, and most of all his inability to make decisions.