If the cliché that the past is a foreign county holds true, then it must be doubly or even triply the case for the Soviet Union. Wrapped in secrecy and misapprehension even at the time, daily life for Soviet citizens was shaped by regulations and, more importantly, tacit rules that evaporated with the gadarene collapse of the USSR. To conjure this vanished world, Kevin Stevens in Song for Katya is faced with challenges similar to those confronting the writer of historical fiction, even though his book is set a mere 25 years ago. He has to provide context without succumbing to what is known by practitioners of science-fiction, another genre preoccupied with exposition, as the “Infodump”.

Stevens adroitly sidesteps such a pitfall in his vivid re-creation of Soviet life during the period known to Russians as zastoi—the long years of stagnation under Brezhnev. First, the novelist brings to the scene a fresh pairs of eyes: Drew Fisher, a troubled, to say the least, pianist in a jazz troupe that has come to Russia on the eve of President Reagan’s inauguration as part of a government-sponsored cultural exchange. Fisher’s personal background echoes that of his hero, jazz legend Bill Evans: a former junkie, he’s haunted by the drug-related death of his ex-wife, the passing of his beloved mother, and strained relations with his semi-alcoholic father. Moscow in the dead of winter might not be the ideal destination for someone with such heavy baggage, but the arrival of the group at the heart of the frozen capital is captured with freshness and not a little hope:

Then, as if in a dream, the Kremlin rose up, solid, baroque, pristine, its towers topped by bright red stars that glowed in the frigid air.

The actual life unfolding behind the forbidding exterior of Moscow’s streetscape is revealed with the character of Katya Timoshenko (whom I involuntary envisioned as resembling the recently ousted Ukrainian PM). Through the choices she must make, the unpalatable facts of life in the Soviet Imperium are transformed into the details of her story. For the sake of her adored children, Anna and Sasha, Katya has remarried. Her husband, Ilya, is a stolid cosmonaut who is obsessed with navigating the space bureaucracy at Baikonur. Katya has entered this loveless union because, as the privileged wife of apparatchik, she is able to have her family housed in relative luxury (“a five-room flat, with a living room that did not double as a bedroom”) at the cosmonaut complex Star City. She and her children are spared most of the grim realities of a decaying city.

Katya may be a Soviet citizen, but she is also a Russian who has read more than her quota of Tolstoy and Pushkin and has imbued their strain of romantic fatalism. Through frustration and by temperament, she is primed for emotional rebellion. And her role as organizer of the tour of Fisher’s troupe will bring her into contact with the man who will shatter the dull stability of her world.

If recapturing the Byzantine world of Soviet protocol—where what is not said is more significant than what is—represents one challenge, the novelist is faced with an equally difficult task in making believable love at (almost) first sight. One might, at times, feel that the Drew’s and Katya’s passionate declarations are made to convince the reader as much as each other of the authenticity of their passion. Yet Stevens is most successful when he finds an analogue to the peremptory nature of attraction in the medium of music, whether through the experience of playing it or hearing it. Jazz, at once the most American and un-American of art forms, comes as a shock to the Soviet audience,

But for Katya it was invigorating. It quickened her pulse and fell across her senses like a sprinkle of rain. It reminded her of Stravinsky – shifting, primal, highly rhythmic – yet had a power all its own. Soon the opening cacophony yielded to a craggy beauty. The drums hissed and exploded; the piano and double bass, plucked rather than bowed, repeated an insistent, trance-like figure. Over this tortuous beat the saxophone came to the fore, deep-toned and growling, sexual in its energy and sway.

Understandably, the pair faces bewilderment as they become consumed by their relationship. Drew’s band mates initially mistake his remoteness as a sign that he’s back on heroin. Things are worse for Katya: Nadia, her selfish and grasping mother, shrieks that if Katya leaves Ilya, she will forfeit “Protection from the filth and corruption”.

Despite warnings from both sides, Drew and Katya are determined that the end of the tour will not mark the end of their affair. And it is a measure of the book’s achievement that the consequences of their actions are both poignant and wholly in keeping with the inexorable laws of a world resurrected by Stevens’s fluid prose.