The Face-Maker and the Muse

In a city where it always rains some people have names while others have only numbers. By means of plastic surgery all are made alike, both outwardly and inwardly. The Face-maker and the Muse is an anti-utopian musing on a society where work is a giant machinery mutilating human beings, where everybody desperately tries to climb the social ladder as high as he/she can, but the success depends on the degree of the person's likeness to the Model Face, created by the Chief Face-maker. From time to time the Model is changed, overturning the entire social structure and causing terrible ordeals. Written in 1977-78 the novel predicted as it were the Gorbachev era and the subsequent social turmoil. In a way it is a philosophical enquiry into the mental anguish of a spiritually aware person in an alien society. But above all this hovers tenderness and an unbelievable need of two human beings for each other: love is an outlet and a promise of renovation and rebirth of the human spirit after all the martyrdom of this century.