The House on the Embankment switches among a first-person narrator, a third-person narration about a figure with whom the narrator shared childhood experiences, and then an omniscient authorial voice. A sharp, satirical portrait of an academic opportunist, the book is paradoxically laced with compassion and humor. Beyond their acute depiction of life in the Soviet Union, these novellas offer an extraordinarily rich literary encounter in the tradition of great nineteenth-century Russian writing.