Facebook Linkedin Instagram Youtube
Facebook Linkedin Instagram Youtube

Laurus

Лавр
Russia
vodolazkin
Evgenii G. Vodolazkin
… Arseny threw stones at pious people's houses. The stones bounced off the logs with a dull wooden thud. Arseny crossed himself and bowed to the residents when they came out of their houses. He walked right up to the houses of the depraved or those who behaved themselves inappropriately. He sank to his knees, kissed the walls of those houses, and quietly said something.

Laurus is a fable in the form of a biography. It tells of a late 15th century village healer is powerless to help his beloved, watching her die in childbirth, die in sin – unwed and without having received communion.  The protagonist, a desperate man, sets out on an exhausting journey in search of redemption. On this journey of privation and hardship in the service of the people, a journey that spans ages and countries, the hero undergoes a painful personal transformation. The protagonist sheds his names at every step of this metamorphosis: in the beginning of the story he is Arseny, a gifted young healer in a small village. After the loss of his beloved, he takes her name and becomes Ustin, wandering through the land as a holy fool (called “yurodivy” in the tradition of the Orthodox Church), and displaying miraculous healing powers during the great plague. Laurus is the protagonist’s name when he, by now an old man and revered by the church and the people, he returns to his home village to lead the life of a monastic hermit and face his most difficult trial yet.

The narrative mode recalls medieval fables and tales. Rich in detail, the story enumerates the countless wonders and healing miracles displayed by Ustin along his journey. The chronicler carefully fixes all the minutiae of the habits and deeds of the medieval doctor and the holy fool, assmebling a gallery of profound portraits. Readers observe Ustin’s patients, his fellow-travellers, Orthodox monks and local governors, and learn about legendary creatures from the strangest medieval bestiaries. The most colourful characters shaping Ustin’s personality on his ascent through the hierarchy of Christian martyrdom follow him on an epic journey to Jerusalem. These include a Franciscan monk, a comic character recalling Chauser’s heroes, and a young scholar with a visionary gift, a clear homage to Umberto Eco’s Baudolino.

This tale, sprawling across time and place, unites carefully researched historical fact with the fantasy of a postmodern space. Vodolazkin baffles his readers with sudden shifts in the manner and pace of the discourse. The reader gets accustomed to the narrative mode of a medieval tale replete with archaic words and anachronisms, when characters exchange modern day vulgarities or switch to bureaucratic jargon. The protagonist kicks aside plastic bottles and litter as he walks through empty streets in villages devastated by the plague. Laurus’s friend and companion, a young scholar from Italy, watches human dramas from the 1960s or 80s in his colorful dreams. Nevertheless, however meticulously depicted the panorama of the Middle Ages in Vodolazkin’s novel, the author’s message stands in clear contradistinction to that of a historical chronicle. For him, time is irrelevant, while the notion of man’s devotion and self-sacrifice for the sake of love is universal.

Andrei Rublev meets The Name of Rose in this profound tale, a spectacular literary achievement. An expert in medieval history and lore, Eugene Vodolazkin writes on the eternal themes of love, loss, self-sacrifice, and faith with the resonating force and gripping force of a masterly storyteller. “If you write a fictional story, it must be a story that can make readers shed tears”, says Eugene Vodolazkin.

Evgenii G. Vodolazkin was born in 1964 in Kiev (Ukraine). In 1981 he finished secondary school and entered Kiev University. There he studied in the Philological Department. In 1986 he finished the University with a degree in Russian literature and language (MA equivalent). In the same year he passed the examinations at the Institute of Russian literature (Pushkin House) of the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg (at that time Leningrad) and started post-graduate courses. There he wrote his thesis on "George the Monk`s Chronicle in Old Russian Literature" and received a degree equivalent to Ph.d. After finishing the research in 1990, he was invited to work in the Department of Old Russian Literature of the above-named Institute.

In 1992-1993, on Prof. D.S. Lichachov`s recommendation, he was given the opportunity to live in Germany and to deepen his knowledge of Byzantinistika and Old Greek language, which is necessary for the research of translated texts. Besides that, he broadened his understanding of Western medieval studies and its methods. At that time he was invited to deliver lectures at Munich University on Old Russian Literature. In 1998 je organized in St. Petersburg an international conference "Monastic Culture: East and West", where the representatives of eight countries took part. In the same year he became a grant holder of the Humboldt Foundation (Germany). In Germany he published book "The World History in the Old Russia" (Munich, Otto Sagner Verlag, 2000) and received a degree equivalent to Dr. habil. He published also some works on Russian literature of 19-th and 20-th centuries (N. Leskov, V. Nabokov).

In 2001 he was a compiler, editor, and writer of a preface to a book devoted to famous Russian thinker D.S. Likhachov (among the authors of the book – Prince of Wales Charles, V. Astafjev, M. Gorbachov, N. Jeltsina etc.). Since 2001 he published also own literary and journalistic (devoted mostly to cultural and scientific life of Russia) works and contribute to numerous Russian newspapers and magazines. His novel “Solovyov and Larionov” (2009) was put on short-lists of Andrei Bely Prize (2009) and Big Book Prize (2010), the novel “Laurus” (2012) won Big Book Prize and Yasnaya Polyana Prize (Tolstoy Prize) and was shortlisted for Russian Booker Prize, National Bestseller Prize and Nos Prize. He lives in St. Petersburg and works at the Institute of Russian literature. Since 2012 he is also an editor-in-chief of the almanac “Text and Tradition”.