Mark Kharitonov’s new novel reads like a fascinating intellectual detective story, somewhat close to his Booker novel “Lines of Fate, or Milashevich’s Chest.” The hero-writer is trying to penetrate into the fate of his father, of whom almost nothing remains, and what remains requires re-examination. Sometimes hope is not so much in evidence, in documents, but in the work of the creative imagination, which can be more reliable than appearances. “Seeing more than is shown” is an ability that is given to few; it requires tension and mental work. And the reliability of the emerging understanding simultaneously determines the real course of life. Imagination reveals true reality - if it is benign, arbitrary fantasy can turn into substitution, defeat, disaster. Thus, a new mythology, historical, national, gives rise to bloody clashes. The heroes of the story “The Knot of Life,” like the heroes of the novel, experience events that turn out to be turning points and key for them. “The knot of life in which we are recognized and untied for being”), Osip Mandelstam said as if about them.