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The novel “Unfinished Portrait” is a unique and touching confession of a person who found himself one step away from the abyss. What led him to such a decision, what unimaginable despair made him look into the eye of the abyss? It is from this moment that the leisurely countdown of the life of the novel's protagonist, Celia, begins... Was it by chance that the writer chose this particular fate, completely unremarkable among thousands of others, of a woman who is no longer able to resist life's challenges? Of course not. The novel largely resonates with the fate of Agatha Christie herself, which was clearly confirmed by her Autobiography, published forty years after Unfinished Portrait. Undoubtedly, the novel is imbued with her own, and therefore so unbearable, longing for Time - with its cloudless childhood, sweet youth, illuminated by a naive readiness for absolute happiness and with all the subsequent stresses: the death of her mother, her husband's betrayal, which, in fact, caused the whole world of both the writer and her heroine to collapse at the same time.

It is known that in December 1926, Agatha Christie stirred up almost all of England: unable to survive the deep despair after her husband's betrayal, she (like her Celia) in a state of dissociative disorder simply disappeared from the world and herself, she was searched for 11 days. Because what is the soul in suffering - it is like a butterfly pinned to a hat alive (!) by someone else's hand - is Celia's childhood traumatic memory, the writer's second self.

To all that has been said about the novel, it is also a sharply nostalgic work, where, against the background of social cataclysms, the life of several generations with their way of life, lifestyle, life experience – all that painful that has sunk into oblivion forever, but for us, modern readers, is undoubtedly of great interest.