On the Sunny Side of the Street

Everything begins with Katya's story — a girl starving during the Siege of Leningrad. Katya is saved thanks to her evacuation to comparatively safe Tashkent, which became a second home for thousands of Soviet citizens fleeing from the Nazi invasion.... As a girl, Katya falls into Tashkent's criminal underworld, becomes a talented con artist, and "works" at the Tashkent markets. Later, out of wedlock, she gives birth to a daughter, Vera. Little Vera is unaware of her mother's business... The girl grows up surrounded by people of various nationalities — Russians, Uzbeks, Jews, Ukrainians... One day, she saves a drunkard, whom she calls Uncle Misha, and he is the one who recognizes her artistic talent and starts to develop it. Later, Vera survives the devastating Tashkent earthquake of 1966 and becomes a world-renowned artist.

Dina Rubina's novel is an unexpected virtuoso stunt "under the dome of literature", an absolute transformation of the writer's style, his usual intonation, and the range of themes.
The fates of the characters in the novel are whimsical, in the "high-voltage" plot love and crime, talent and passion, capable of destroying the personality or elevating it to the heights of creativity, are intertwined.
Open this novel — and you will not be released by the truly Babylonian crowd of types: urban madmen and drunks, Russian nobility, exiles and ex-convicts, "white colonizers" and "hashish hunters"…
A popular series has been filmed based on Dina Rubina's novel "On the Sunny Side of the Street", featuring performances by Alexander Domogarov, Sergey Makovetsky, and Anna Snatkina.