This is the preface as it stands at the front of the printed trilogy — the author speaking to someone who is holding the three books in their hands. It is reproduced here in full.
Before you are three books. Each is fully self-contained, written in its own genre for its own reader; yet together they form one ontological story of freedom, of choice, and of the calling of man.
The first book is a world in which Adam asks the question of freedom in its pure form: what is freedom that is doomed to pain? What is man before the face of a silent Heaven? This is the world on high, the world of myth, where time is pressed into eternity. The story of Adam is our common genetic memory, written down in stories: the exile from paradise, the fratricidal fury of Cain, the God-defying cry of Job, the last question from the Cross. It is the lived experience of human freedom — from the choice at the Tree to the despair in Gethsemane. It is the way of a soul which, in order truly to find Love, fell away from that Love and came to know all the bitterness of the falling away.
The second book is the concrete, condensed, painful world of reality, shown through literary form. It probes the question of the worth of freedom under ultimate conditions. What does prayer sound like behind barbed wire, when God is silent not as a metaphor but in truth? This is the world below, where eternity is frozen into the ice of the tragic events of the twentieth century. Here the story of Adam reads as the story of particular people: a monk, a painter, an archivist, a baker. The longing for paradise becomes a struggle for a human face in hell.
The third book is the way out — through the finding of true freedom, the breath of the Holy Spirit in the vessel-temple of the human body, the fulfillment of Adam’s calling as priest, king, and prophet. Its central figure, Fr Pavel Adelgeim, passes through a friend’s denunciation, an Easter in a solitary cell, and an amputation without anesthesia — to a fullness of life over which death no longer has dominion. In this man the void at last finds its Filling — not in a blinding revelation, but in the quiet of an ordinary house, where warm flatbread lies on the table, tea is cooling, and a cat sleeps on a chair.
In these three worlds is the whole of our story. A story in which salvation comes not as a thunderous victory but as a quiet, stubborn, living “why” breaking through the thickness of the ice. The trilogy is the story of that “why“. Of the breath that binds myth to reality, pain to hope, and our ancient wound of Adam to the possibility of its healing.