Lev and Svetlana, lovers in Stalin's Soviet Union, were kept apart for 14 years—first by World War II, and then by the paranoid caprices of Stalin's Gulag, where Lev was sent for an imagined offense. Incredibly, he one day received a letter from Svetlana, and in his remaining years of imprisonment the two exchanged 1500 smuggled pieces of correspondence. In these letters, interpreted and put into context by the author of The Whisperers and Natasha's Dance, Lev not only carries on a relationship that will outlast even the Soviet Union itself—the author was able to interview the couple, then in their 90s, in person—he also records a day-by-day account of life in the Gulag.