Kyiv, late Brezhnev era. Julia, a dreamy yet rebellious girl, grows up in the milieu of the bourgeois Jewish intelligentsia. While her father, who lives in constant fear of being denounced, writes texts for a circus revue, she spends her nights conversing with the leaders of the world proletariat. An older gentleman, who poses as a Pole and writes works on French cuisine, shows her the anatomical theater from the tsarist and White Guard era. The building, hidden in gardens, and the aura of death and material decay draw her in like a magnet. Here lies a knowledge, the "lunatism," an enhanced self-awareness in moonlight, with which she can escape the demands of an oppressive reality. Sad, angry, and gifted with visionary eloquence, Julia Kissina describes her Soviet childhood against the backdrop of the physical and.