Herbarium with Ice Flowers is the author’s debut novel.
This work can be briefly described as a psychological novel with criminal elements, but at its core, it is a multi-layered exploration of collective guilt. It examines the paradoxical nature of human actions, every act, whether an intentional transgression, an accidental mistake, a conscious decision, negligence, or an unfulfilled duty, sets off a domino effect whose consequences for the future and for the lives of others are both unpredictable and inevitable.
– Evil is not meant to be understood; it must be fought or accepted. There is no other way. – Vincent felt how hopeless and meaningless his words sounded at that moment.
– Everything can’t be that simple. We can’t truly fight what we don’t understand. Where does it come from? Why? After the creation of the world, Cain, the son of Adam and Eve, killed his brother Abel, and that is how evil entered the world—the original, primordial evil. But where does it come from now? It doesn’t fall from the sky; it grows here among us. We are born human, among humans; we don’t descend from a foreign, evil planet. So who created this walking evil?
Herbarium with Ice Flowers is a psychological and social novel centered on the theme of collective guilt. Its central question asks: can a person passively tolerate evil if taking action would result in even greater harm?
This is a classic and powerful ethical paradox that prompts more questions than it answers.
The novel critiques existing power structures and institutional weakness. The small-town police are depicted as a system that not only makes mistakes but sometimes reproduces evil intentionally. The city and its inhabitants, by contrast, form a collective organism that chooses silence over justice.
With this novel, the author continues her exploration of evil begun in earlier story collections, a theme further developed in her subsequent novel, Demiurge.
Both Herbarium with Ice Flowers and Demiurge examine the ethical responsibility of the individual in a society that is unwilling or unable to confront evil. The distinction is that Demiurge approaches this through a psychologically subjective lens, while Herbarium with Ice Flowers does so via social tragedy.
This work is not a traditional crime novel, though crimes are depicted, nor is it a thriller, though it maintains constant tension that holds the reader’s attention to the last page. Herbarium with Ice Flowers is a novel of ethical impasse, dismantling the illusion of justice in modern society and revealing institutions, police, community, and others, that may function morally but remain ethically empty. The book poses a classic, highly relevant question: is passive inaction worse than active violence? Rather than providing an answer, it invites the reader to reflect on irrevocable decisions and their consequences.
The book was published with the support of the State Cultural Capital Foundation.