Parting

The novel «Parting» by L. Borodin is built around the idea of God. Its hero, a Moscow intellectual, decides to begin a new life. Somewhere in Siberia he finds Father Vasily and his daughter Tosya, who live with God in their souls—around them an atmosphere of purity and love draws the hero in. But he doesn’t feel pure enough to accept such a gift from fate, and he leaves for Moscow to set his affairs—above all, his inner ones—in order.

From Siberia, his entire Moscow life seemed to him clear, understandable, and easy to transform into the direction he needed for cleansing. But when he arrives and comes face to a living, unpredictable flow, he becomes hopelessly entangled in it, because his communication with Tosya has given him the ability to see other people’s lives far more sharply and to perceive their pain more intensely than before. They arrest his sister—an embittered dissident—and he can no longer say «she has jumped too far»; his father, with whom relations had been so simple and convenient, turns out to be suddenly vulnerable and capable of unexpected acts; the “hack work” he used to do with cold cynicism becomes a moral problem; his mistress is expecting a child, and this fact grows beyond everyday meaning, predetermines his fate. An inner upheaval occurs— the cold rationalist becomes a living man, now closer to God than ever. Yet the price for all this is Tosya’s ruined destiny, to which the hero can no longer return.