Deborah Treisman

They can't see the beauty in it.

They can't see what it is.

They just have to, you know, pin a label on it.

But then he goes off and he does his two years in the camp.

We don't hear anything about it.

And then he's freed.

He's freed from his former marriage.

He's freed from...

I don't know, everything that was kind of holding him in.

And you might say it's not an advancement because he's no longer a dissident, right?

He's no longer fighting.

He's no longer an idealist in that way.

He just emigrates, finds a woman who's much better for him and emigrates.

So, you know, in some ways it's not a success story if what you want is to see your dissident prevailing over, you know, authoritarianism.

What do you think of that ending?

Well, there's something slightly mystifying to me in that paragraph where, you know, she says that he emigrates to Europe with his new wife.

And she says they were living happily in Europe until recently.

So we don't know what happened recently.

We don't know if they're no longer living, if they're no longer in Europe, or if they're no longer happy.

And, you know, except that her poor mother, she misses Boris Ivanovich because this is just a very ordinary engineer.