Laurus by Eugene Vodolazkin
Fictionalised life of a saint who journeys through grief, time, and the miraculous.
Finished: 7 March 2024
Rating: ★★★★★
“Put a seed in your mouth and water will part, Christofer once said.
It will part? asked Arseny, serious.
With prayer it will part. Christofer began to feel awkward. Everything is about prayer, after all.
Well, then why do you need that seed? The boy lifted his head and saw Christofer was smiling.
That is the legend. It is up to me to tell you this."
Set in medieval Russia, Laurus is a fictionalised hagiography, the story of a saint. It is neither fantasy nor magical realism, but rather that particular mode of religious storytelling where miracles happen as a matter of fact. The protagonist, who begins his life named Arseny and ends it named Laurus, is a healer who lays his hands on the sick and leaves them well. We are to take this as reality, and reality is perhaps a little stranger than it would seem.
I loved this book. I read it twice in rapid succession (a rarity). This was a while ago, and I’ve been finding it difficult to write anything that captures this adequately but I want to try and articulate why this had such an impact on me. In sum, this is a book that gets very close to the heart of sacredness without announcing itself as such, and I will try to explain what that means to me. Laurus takes place in a younger, wilder world — one that lived in the heart of mystery, one in which things lacked a scientific explanation and so made simpler and deeper sense. Eugene Vodolazkin wanted to write about “a man capable of sacrifice”, a good man, and to tell a “narrative of the soul”, something decisively against the trends of today. Not to preach, mind you, but instead to return to asking important questions in the right ways. And what a relief — I’ve been tiring of all the Substacks and think-pieces peddling insights and bullet-point guides to an audience hungry for the one idea that will make it all make sense.
But life is darker and more mysterious than that. Laurus spends his days in inner turmoil, seeking to give of himself in order to atone for a past wrong that plagues him, seeking to sacrifice his own self for the possibility of redemption. I’ve been thinking about the concept of devotion, as people have increasingly been talking about rituals and meaning and agency. In certain, more secular circles, people are very active doers who encourage one another to be “agentic” — they seek meaning, they build habits, they do rituals, they get shit done. Far less frequently do I see in these same circles the concepts of surrender and devotion. In relation to meditation practices and states of altered consciousness, people do talk about the dissolution of self, ego death, and achieving a state where nothing is done and everything simply happens in an unstoppable flow of events. You are no longer trying to paddle down the river; you are simply carried by it. I don’t think I mean that (though I’m sure that I’m operating under erroneous assumptions on every side of this). Rather, I mean that surrender and devotion involve dedication of the self to something greater than and beyond itself, allowing it to go beyond itself and properly realise its place in the universe, the place it should have been all along.
It’s a very complicated thing now to live a “meaningful” life, especially when you have to generate the meaning yourself. There are so many things that one must do and achieve and try and think about and feel, and the world can look like a barren wasteland of rocks overturned to find (surprise!) no meaning beneath them. Laurus has no such complications. He knows what he has devoted himself to and tries to figure out what he must do to fulfil the vows he has made. To be clear, this is not a happy or straightforward path, and it involves a lot of suffering, but it becomes a necessary path for Laurus. Very rarely now do I see people on paths that they consider necessary in the sense of fulfilling not a vague sense of “meaning” but instead a purpose that reality demands. Every time I meet one of these people, they are actively tending a framework of how they understand the world to work and slotting themselves in where they feel called to. This mode of operation is one of devotion that is able to (i) motivate the actions of surrender and sacrifice and (ii) generate the feelings of contentment, fulfilment, and happiness, in a way that cannot be recreated or sustained by simply attempting to pursue (i) and (ii) as primary goals for their own sakes. In other words, the search for “meaning” might be a red herring. Perhaps the more fruitful path is the search for truth.
In the past, I have generally thought that the main purpose of a ritual is to appropriately direct attention, and I wrote about this regarding Jon Fosse’s Septology. But I increasingly think that it is necessary to have some kind of devotion to anchor a ritual. Otherwise, what are you directing that attention towards? How do you make that decision? Part of the appeal of Laurus, as can also be the appeal of philosophy or religion or even science, is a world in which there is an up, there is a down, and there is a place that a person can take within that order and be well-oriented. The world of Laurus comes across in a friendly manner because we’re separated from those beliefs by time and ‘enlightenment’, and we enter into it as a space of imagination. But that world and reality still exist, and people on a necessary path are the ones who pursue access to them. Devotion, in the context of such a world, is devotion to the order of that world and the beliefs that necessarily go along with it.
Take the world of Laurus for a second. Time is circular. The ancient understanding of the motion of history is as a circle; the Christian understanding of the motion of time is as a spiral. As Vodolazkin puts it: “the Orthodox divine service does not simply remember the events of the sacral history. It lives them again. It lives them with the memory of the previous, or the first time of this event.” Ritual is thus remembrance (“re-member”) in the most fundamental sense: it is a putting-back-together-again of the world, and in doing so, we enact the world. Rituals structure time, but not just in the way of having a morning ritual or an evening ritual. If we understand rituals through this approach to time, they stitch together past and present, and they make possible a coherent future. The latter cannot happen without the former. “When a person loses memory, he loses experience, and with lost experience he loses his personality. The same is happening with people. And the consequences are catastrophic.” The ritual of the divine liturgy is inseparable from, and it is powerless without, devotion to this particular understanding of the world. For the acts of the ritual, though they appear more like the staging of a play, are at the same time an interaction with reality. The ritual, as symbol, does not merely reference — it actuates.
And so, it’s worth ensuring that the thing you are devoted to is aligned with reality. And so, it matters intensely that your perception and awareness of the world is accurate. Be no one, a friend said to me, recently. For if you are someone, then you begin to introduce all the anxieties of being perceived by others, by the world, and all of this interference gets in the way of you being as close to your own perception as possible.* Laurus abandons the sense of a unified self as he moves through his various identities — Arseny, Ustin, Amvrosy, and, finally, Laurus — comparing life to “a mosaic that scatters into pieces”. He is devoted to a mission beyond himself, a truth that required the emptying of who he was. He “dissolved [himself] in God”. But the purpose of that scattering is to be connected to something truer, something that runs through the deeper structures of the universe. In each small, separate stone, “[t]here is something more important in each of them… striving for the one who looks from afar,” Elder Innokenty says to Laurus, and “in the mosaic of your life there is also something that joins all those separate parts: it is an aspiration for Him. They will gather together again in Him.” The more I empty my sense of self, the more I clear my vision, the more I seem to feel the fabric of the universe and how everything is connected, how nothing is separate. Everything is like everything else.
The sacredness that lies in this transformation is the way in which it both (i) challenges the illusion of reality we begin with and (ii) helps us to understand what reality might really consist of, to the extent that we can perceive it. Perhaps this is really just any vehicle that helps us to navigate this journey, whatever that vehicle might be. I think often of the story about Carl Jung from Marie-Louise von Franz’s Creation Myths, where an aged Jung reportedly says that you must have your own myths, which means we must have “struggled and suffered with a question until an answer has come to you from the depths of your soul. That does not imply that this is the definitive truth, but rather that this truth which has come is relevant for oneself as one now is”.
And I guess I’ve taken so long to write this because I’ve been in the struggle of uncovering my own personal myth and the legend I want to pass on.** And this isn’t the last word; I expect it to change, to deepen, and to grow. *Laurus* offers one way in and, in its illustration, gives us a sense of what we might be aiming for — the things to which we might surrender, might devote ourselves to.
[*] Which reminds me, of course, of one of my favourite parts of The Odyssey where Odysseus tricks the cyclops Polyphemus by calling himself “Nobody”, causing Polyphemus to roar out that “Nobody” is hurting him. And I am reminded, even further, of Amorak Huey’s “We Were All Odysseus In Those Days” on the luck of surviving war and seeking to be no one at all in the hopes of being permitted to live in peaceful obscurity — “It’s about doing what it takes / to get home … / Call me nobody. Let me live.”
[**] “I know this isn’t much. / But I wanted to explain this life to you, even if / I had to become, over the years, someone else to do it.” —Larry Levis, from “My Story in a Late Style of Fire”