More than just historical prose, Cho’lpon’s magnum opus reads as poetic elegy and turns on dramatic irony. Though , the first and only extant book of the dilogy, depicts the terrible fate of a young girl condemned to marry a sexual glutton, nothing is what it seems. Readers find themselves questioning the nature of Russian colonialism, resistance to it, and even the intentions of the author, whose life and the second book of his dilogy, , were lost to Stalinist terror.