The Living Thing is the second novel of Frederica's Quartet, considered perhaps the main work of Dame Antonia Susan Byatt of the Order of the British Empire. The tetralogy was written over a quarter of a century, and its plot also spans a quarter of a century, with the first two novels published before the Booker Prize-winning international bestseller Possess, and the third and fourth after. So, Frederica Potter begins to study at Cambridge, frantically hungry for knowledge, for an independent, adult life, for love - exactly at the moment in history when traditionally isolated Britain receives a massive inoculation of European culture and begins to change irreversibly. While her older sister Stephanie sacrifices her studies and scientific career for the sake of her family, and her younger brother Marcus is recovering from a nervous breakdown, Frederica, in contrast to Monet and Mallarmé, who insisted on the “happiness of gradually guessing the subject,” prefers to call a spade a spade. And neither Frederica, nor Stephanie, nor Marcus have any idea what tragedy awaits them all in the future... For the first time in Russian!