It is Sophie's memoir - the story of everyday life of a commoner with all the routine and its high and low moments, with pain, errors and cowardice, having rejected and having been rejected - it is a story of a person, coming of age at a time of global catastrophe. There is nothing remotely grandiose in Sophie's own private life, save the grandiosity of the background. Therefore, the main character, the hero of it, is not Sophie, but her country, Russia then and there, through the eyes of its maturing child.