Atonement

In the late 1970s, Friedrich Gorenstein emigrated after the publication of his audacious “Metropolis,” where one of his novellas appeared—the largest, incidentally, text in the almanac. For two decades now he has been living in the West, but his texts are saturated with the most current—because enduring—problems of our shared Russian reality. The writer’s view of these issues is not narrowly social, but metaphysical: he writes completely differently from the “sixtiers.” Sometimes it seems that his freedom is like freedom of breathing in a rarefied space, where not everyone can get enough air. Or freedom of courage: to name and discuss things that are hard to talk about—or simply not accepted. Taboo—on Jews. A double taboo—Jews about Russia. Triple taboo—Jews, about Russia, about Orthodoxy. Gorenstein allowed himself to break all three taboos, for which he was repeatedly accused of both Russophobia and blasphemy, and even of something like antisemitism.