The Tax Collector. Threshold of the Heart

This book is easy to read. Just come a little closer to its heroes, and the deceptively unhurried flow of their life—at first glance—carries the reader along, from one event to another. Harder to get out of that flow. This book is hard to read. And if someone dares to become a friend of an old warrior who, beyond the threshold of death, has taken on a special duty—to speak to people in the voice of their conscience… if someone dares to jump from a train with the sixteen-year-old hero at an ordinary Siberian platform station… if someone looks into the eyes of a girl begging for alms on Christmas night… then they will more than once have to hurt themselves on the stones of the harshest questions of our time. But if you stay with the heroes of this book until the end, perhaps its stream will carry you to the shore of joy and pain—pain that is scary to lose, and joy mixed with sorrow.

Approved for distribution by the Publishing Council of the Russian Orthodox Church.