The place-names for the parts of the novel set in the Moscow region and western Russia are real; the place-names in the Urals—Yuriatin, Varykino, Rynva—are fictional. And there is a corresponding difference in “worlds”—the one more historical, the other more folkloric. The novel moves from the one to the other and back again. There is also a double sense of time, marked by two different calendars, civil and church-festal, the first linear, the second cyclical.
