The Rebinder Effect

This novel is a “collection of colorful chapters,” where each chapter is titled with a line from Pushkin and becomes a self-contained story about one of the heroes. And the heroes are many: a gifted musician of the post-war era; a “sweet ladies’ man”; and an unremarkable diligent schoolgirl from the mid-1950s, whose soul burns with passions invisible to the world—envy, jealousy, forbidden love. There’s also a boy from an orphanage, an atomic physicist, the son of a repressed commissar, and a village “scorched survivor,” a witness to the GULAG—along with many, many others. Private stories grow into a picture of Russian history in the 20th century, but this is not a historical canvas; rather, it’s a many-layered family saga. And the further the narrative goes, the more the heroes’ fates intertwine around the mysterious Kateniyn family—the descendants of “that very Kateniin,” Pushkin’s friend.

The novel is full of riddles and secrets, passions and resentments, love and bitter losses. And increasingly, an analogy arises with a narrow scientific concept, the “Rebinder effect”: just as a drop of tin can break a flexible steel strip, so an apparently insignificant event can completely change and shatter a particular human life.