Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt is a philosopher and researcher of the human soul, writer and film director, one of the most successful European playwrights, a man who, in his books “The Gospel of Pilate”, “The Sect of Egoists”, “Oscar and the Pink Lady”, “ Monsieur Ibrahim and the Flowers of the Koran”, “The Woman in the Mirror” asked questions to God and Pontius Pilate, Buddha and Mohammed, Freud and Mozart. This time he asks questions to a person. For the first time in Russian, a novel by E.-E. Schmitt’s “Another Fate.” “The paths of evil are inscrutable...” the poet wrote. “What if...,” the writer thought, “you just have to find a certain point, a turning point, after which everything turned out exactly this way and not otherwise.” And E.-E. Schmitt found this point. “Adolf G.: accepted,” says the minister of the Vienna Academy of Arts on October 8, 1908. A nineteen-year-old boy, bursting into a happy smile, rushes towards his classmates. A completely different fate begins.