Daughter of the Night

Mid-winter Petrograd glitters like a cracked Fabergé egg: inside the gilded nightclub Le Minuit d’Or, Count Luc de Villeneuve—whose blood is as blue as the frost on the Neva—watches the chanteuse Ljuba, a siren in moth-eaten velvet, exhale smoke and revolution between couplets. One stolen kiss later, the Frenchman’s diamond studs are pawning themselves to bankroll her clandestine printing press; by spring he is smuggling seditious broadsheets under the petticoats of duchesses, learning that love, like nitroglycerine, crystallizes in the cold. When Okhrana agents corner Ljuba on the Liteyny Bridge, Luc barters his pedigree for her life, signing a confession that brands him imperial traitor. Exiled to the Urals, he escapes with the help of a mute convict who etches maps on soap; he returns to a capital on the cusp of October, where Ljuba—now star witness in a show trial—must decide whether to sing for the tsar’s bullets or the people’s roar. The final reel combusts in the Winter Palace’s malachite corridor: chandeliers crash, chandeliers rise again as stars, and two lovers, no longer aristocrat and proletarian but comrades in a new grammar of time, walk into a white-out dawn that erases every surname, every border.