That may be one reason the show has felt unusually emotionally safe to some viewers. Not because nothing bad happens, and not because homophobia or family damage disappears, but because the relationship is treated as durable. Even if the world is harsh, the love plot asks the viewer to trust that tenderness can last. That kind of durability is not what Russian high culture is best known for. Yet Helen Stuhr-Rommereim suggests that this “modest fantasy,” too, has precedents in Russian literature, including Nikolai Pomialovsky’s little-known 1861 novel Molotov, a class-focused romance whose rare insistence on a livable happy ending performs a similar kind of consolation. {read}