A multitude of different personalities dwell within each of us, yet a rational mind suppresses any attempt they might make to assert their independence. Rosa, the protagonist of Tatyana Shcherbina’s novel, spent many years in a lethargic sleep; it is hardly surprising, then, that she slips back and forth between classical antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the final years of the USSR. Yet the other female characters in the story undergo even more astonishing metamorphoses in the waking world. *The Multiplication of Personality* focuses on the Russia of recent decades: here we find Pushkin appearing in 2006 Moscow, Russian presidents cast as Shakespearean figures, and a Laertes poisoned by polonium... But a mystery remains: does time flow in only one direction—from the past into the future?