Sin - A Novel in Short Stories (Грех - роман в рассказах)
by Zakhar Prilepin
Synopsis
Sin - A Novel in Short Stories by Zakhar Prilepin is made up of seven stories from one man's life whose name is Zakhar. A selection of poems written by the protagonist forms the eighth part of the novel, while the ninth is a story about war, ending in death.
Happiness and oblivion are the two themes which are present throughout the book. A sense of the brilliant completeness of life on which shadow invariably falls.
In the first story we find Zakhar experiencing the best day of his life, on the peak of happiness from a shared love which paints life's every silly little thing in joyous colours. Everything brings him joy. Neither lack of money or settled future can get to him. But the reader feels disturbed. Fear starts to creep in. This serenity is too precarious and too vulnerable.
We then see Zakhar in different points of his life – at each point, alongside an oversaturated flow of life, there will loom a lingering and close emptiness which sucks up life, which goes in one direction. “There will still be another kind of summer and it will be warm and people will hold flowers in their hands...” seventeen year old Zakharka convinces himself, abandoning the languor of of the last summer of his childhood. “But there was never a another kind of summer” - the story concludes.
“There won't be anything” is the title of the last story about happiness. Zakhar's grandmother dies and he leaves the house under a child's cape. He hurries through the winter night to a far away village in a “big white car” bought with his earnings. The car is driven onto the crossroads by the ice and ends up under a wagon zooming along...We are left with one more mention of death.
The last story, the epilogue, comes after the poems in the book and is written from a third person's point of view. A sergeant refuses to fight in the war not so much for the earnings but because he has run from his feeling of vulnerability – something so humiliating for a man. This feeling first arose after the birth of his children and has grown to the point where he no longer has the right to die when he wants.