The story follows young Sasha, a high school graduate who’s been planning to enter university and study linguistics until she is recruited by a strange, vaguely menacing man during a beach resort holiday and ordered instead to attend a mysterious college in the little-known, provincial town of Torpa. But it’s far and away a very different beast from J. The book has been described as an “anti-Harry Potter novel”, and insofar as it offers a darker, more mysterious and philosophical version of the ‘magical recruit’ trope, this is true. Like the exercises Sasha works through in the novel, Vita Nostra seems at first to be just beyond comprehension, but as readers proceed, it becomes more and more intoxicating as understanding blooms in the reader’s mind.Julia Meitov Hersey, translator of Vita Nostra, describes her effort as a work of love, undertaken so that other English language readers will be able to enjoy the delights the Russian-language book first brought her.
Maturation is itself addressed as a form of transformation over the course of the novel, explored through several facets of Sasha’s life as she departs girlhood and grows into womanhood while attending the Institute.
The strangeness of the Institute is most apparent in the Specialty course, where students are given bizarre coursework: memorizing passages they can’t read and that make no sense, booklets of 'exercises' that seem impossible to solve, even assignments given on CD audio tracks. The novel reads at first like an ominous and mature Harry Potter: rather than an unhappy child transported to a magical school to explore almost endless possibilities, Sasha is taken from her fairly happy though mundane life and brought to a postsecondary institution with one course of study and only one possible outcome.
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