Vodolazkin: Laurus

Laurus
Evgeny Vodolazkin
Translated from the Russian by Lisa Hayden
(Oneworld, 2015) [2013]
362 p.

The press surrounding Laurus has been so positive, and the book made to sound so intriguing, that it succeeded in coaxing me out from under my rock to buy a copy. First published in Russia in 2013, it accumulated a pile of literary awards, and the English translation appeared last year, accompanied by a chorus of praise.

The novel is about a fifteenth-century Russian healer named Arseny. He is a physician, of sorts, though he himself is uncertain how much of his success is due to his medicines and how much to the touch of his own hands. He travels from place to place, even making a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. His name changes several times; he accepts whatever name those around him wish to use, but it also happens that each name change corresponds to a change in his way of life.

It is probably fair to see Arseny as an example of a “holy fool”: a saintly figure whose eccentricities both divide him from others and endear him to them. He lives alone much of the time, often under very ascetic conditions, on the outskirts of towns, even in a graveyard. He dresses in rags, his hair is dishevelled, he eats hardly at all, he seeks the company of the dead, yet he has a penetrating knowledge of hearts, and of the future, and people stream to him for cures.

Figures of this sort have appeared in sacred tradition, but, unless I am mistaken, there is usually something opaque about them. They fascinate precisely because they are so out of the ordinary; we can hardly imagine what is going on in their heads. Laurus is a remarkable example of an attempt to get inside such a character.

One of the more interesting aspects of the story is how it plays with time: telescoping it, folding it back on itself, collapsing the distinction between past and future. Several characters in the story have foreknowledge of future events, and Arseny sometimes simultaneously experiences himself at different stages of his life. The language of the book reflects this: the narrator speaks sometimes in Chaucerian English, sometimes in a traditional narrative voice, and sometimes in modern slang, sometimes all of them in the span of a single sentence. This is an intriguing literary device, although I admit that I am not quite sure why Vodolazkin has done this. It might be an attempt to suggest that a saint, as he approaches God, begins to experience something like the Eternal “now” of God’s timelessness.

Early in the book Arseny does something which leads to the death of one whom he loves, and this becomes the catalyst for his internal transformation, as he seeks to atone for his sins and those of his beloved. His life becomes one long exercise in the extinction of his ego, until he becomes a kind of window through which others see something radiant. He himself does not really see it. This course of self-denial reaches an apex in a remarkable scene in which he is given an opportunity to re-live that original, fatal decision, and when he chooses rightly it is at the cost of his last shreds of self-possession and respectability.

There is a good deal of religious content in the book. Some have claimed that the experience of reading it has led them to prayer, but I cannot say that was true of me. In fact, although Arseny is clearly an Orthodox Christian, there is relatively little Christian language in the book (there is some), and his spiritual life is not especially clearly focused on traditional Christian elements (as, for example, Christ, or the Church, or the Blessed Virgin, or grace). Alan Jacobs, usually an astute commentator on literary matters, described the book’s spiritual climate as being closer to Hunduism than Christianity; this strikes me as an odd and overly strong claim, but there may be a hint of something to it.

What bothered me most about the book was its tendency to be a bit quirky. I kept thinking of the magical realism of writers like Salman Rushdie or Umberto Eco — wonderful writers (and Vodolazkin, to the extent that he can be judged in translation, is a very fine writer too), but lacking in heft.

Overall, though, I did enjoy the novel, and I found that it improved as it progressed. I’d recommend it.

**

This review, from the New Yorker, is quite good.