In his new novel with the provocative title “A Cheerful Life, or Sex in the USSR,” Yuri Polyakov takes us to 1983. The author skillfully, with sly nostalgia, recreates a long-gone world. The reader, as always, is treated to a masterfully twisted plot in which big politics, nomenklatura games, intrigues of the creative community and risky love adventures are intertwined. “The Chronicle of Those Still Years” is written lively and witty, and the language is figurative and aphoristic. One of the critics successfully called Polyakov’s new novel “The Decameron of the Age of Stagnation.”