For the ultimately free and ultimately lonely "existential" person, forgiveness is a difficult task. Difficult not only because it allows only one form of responsibility-to oneself, but also because it often turns out to be the fault of the "forgiver". This guilt becomes the sole, if painful, basis of his existence, the source of the almost impossible words that forgiveness is both trouble, and seduction, and madness, and the punishment of the body, and lies, and truth, and crime, and unforgiveness, in the end. Driven by the difficult work of forgiveness, Polina Barskova's prose proves in these almost impossible words that forgiveness can be transformed into the last art form available to the "existential" person — the art of looking at people through a terrible historical microscope and seeing them in a huge, saving approximation.