Perhaps, since the time of Somerset Maugham, no writer has plunged so deeply into the atmosphere of the theater as Anna Matveeva plunged into it. The stories “The Taking of the Bastille” and “Find Tatiana” are thoroughly imbued with a theatrical spirit. But unlike Maugham, Matveeva’s theater is not a dramatic stage, but high opera. The brilliance of wondrous talent and the delight of musical self-forgetfulness are replaced here by pictures of the bitterness of abandonment, behind-the-scenes intrigue and the marketplace of ambition. Essentially, The Phantom of the Opera is an extended Shakespearean metaphor for life, sometimes sounding like a crystal note, sometimes crunching through the broken glass of everyday life.