When she knocks him flying in Tunbridge Wells, Verity realises she has not been able to get him out of her mind.Tumbling towards a promising future, Verity must confront the shadows of Henry’s tragic past. Matters come to a head when the children are kidnapped, but it takes a threat to Henry himself to test the strength of Verity’s love and the truth of a gypsy’s prophecy.

    They find there a world familiar from the moral and philosophic landscapes of Pushkin, Lermontov, and Tolstoy. In Lessons of Armenia, the first of the two personal memoirs that constitute this book, Bitov explores the way Pushkin's confines of boundless Russia seem never to be truly escapable. Though held in thrall by Armenia, a captive of the Caucasus, Bitov the traveler is a captive, however alienated, of his homeland, too. Bitov's works characteristically proceed from and comment on one another, and the realization of captivity leads to a different journey; the second account, Choosing a Location, an entertaining impressionistic record of his travels in Soviet Georgia, is Bitov's quest for his own place and time. Compellingly conceived and spectacularly crafted, A Captive of the Caucasus is an intellectually spirited inquiry into the persistent idea of homeland and the individual's identity, cultural and creative. When Lessons of Armenia first appeared in the Soviet Union in 1969, censors deleted its subtitle, Journey Out of Russia, and made numerous small cuts. This translation restores all the deletions. Choosing a Location could not be published in the Soviet Union.

    But it was read out by the author to "all Moscow" and to "all Petersburg" and circulated in innumerable copies, so it was as good as published in 1825; it was not, however, actually published until 1833, after the author's death, with significant cuts, and was not published in full until 1861.The play was a compulsory work in Russian literature lessons in Soviet schools, and is still considered a golden classic in modern Russia and other Russian-speaking countries.