Presumption of Guilt

The novel «Presumption of Guilt» is the best confirmation of that. Can one live with the burden of guilt? To constantly suffer from the fact that a loved one died because of you? Grandma Lida lived that way. During the Patriotic War, her sister Zoya was connected with partisans and was shot by the Nazis. Lida was sure that she was to blame. Out of stubbornness, she didn’t listen to her sister, acted as she pleased, inadvertently betraying Zoya. Grandma Lida lived her entire life with this stone around her neck. It wouldn’t let her live, and she couldn’t get rid of it. Over time, she learned to measure everything by Zoya's standards and to see everything through Zoya's eyes, as if living not her own life, but Zoya's. Lidia's granddaughters, although they didn’t know the whole truth, also seemed to pay for this guilt — the lives of all three were somehow pointless. If Grandma knew she had the right to take this stone off her soul, would her life and the lives of her granddaughters have turned out differently? And is it possible to talk about this in the subjunctive mood?

Anna Babina is a young prose writer, a finalist for the «Lyceum» award (2022), and a winner of the publishing program of the art cluster. Her bibliography is still small, but it is quite clear that she is a talented author with her own perspective on the world.