Czesław Miłosz is an outstanding Polish poet and intellectual, a Nobel Prize laureate (1980). His best novel was written in Polish, but first published in France (in Poland Miłosz’s books were banned). This is a novel about good and evil, sin and grace, predestination and freedom. It is a lost paradise of childhood on the shore of an invented river—“the search for reality cleansed of time that’s slipping away” (Cz. Miłosz). The novel’s main character— the author’s alter ego— is a growing being, constantly overcoming its boundaries.
The novel will undoubtedly join the ranks of books (from Aksakov to Nabokov) that open the world of childhood to readers. For the Russian language, it was translated for the first time.