Laurus Paperback – August 9, 2016
It is the late fifteenth century and a village healer in Russia called Laurus is powerless to help his beloved as she dies in childbirth, unwed and without having received communion. Devastated and desperate, he sets out on a journey in search of redemption. But this is no ordinary journey: it is one that spans ages and countries, and which brings him face-to-face with a host of unforgettable, eccentric characters and legendary creatures from the strangest medieval bestiaries.
Laurus’s travels take him from the Middle Ages to the Plague of 1771, where as a holy fool he displays miraculous healing powers, to the political upheavals of the late-twentieth century. At each transformative stage of his journey he becomes more revered by the church and the people, until he decides, one day, to return to his home village to lead the life of a monastic hermit – not realizing that it is here that he will face his most difficult trial yet.
Laurus is a remarkably rich novel about the eternal themes of love, loss, self-sacrifice and faith, from one of Russia’s most exciting and critically acclaimed novelists.
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"LAURUS is no seamless dream of Russia’s past, but a very clever, self-aware contemporary novel that nevertheless holds that dream deep in its heart.... The fools are holy, but they also bash each other and defend turf. A great deal of the novel’s humor derives from this kind of absurd juxtaposition. On this earth, one can never quite break free of petty, ridiculous, earthly concerns. Even the ancient sage Christofer is regularly consulted about 'bedroom matters.' Much of the humor in Dostoevsky has exactly this origin. Equally rich are the novel’s clashes of language and diction, a savory stew made up of high and low, the ecclesiastical and the obscene, as well as the crazily modern. Translator Lisa Hayden had a tall order before her — Vodolazkin’s book in Russian overflows with Old Church Slavonic, contemporary slang, obscenities, bureaucratese, literary language. In translating, she avails herself of the contemporaneous Middle English Bible for much of the syntax and archaisms, but also a range of slang, curses, and other vocabularies. The result is a wonderful, at times almost Monty Python–esque blend of biblical vanisheth, synne, and prude, right alongside shithead, jeez, and Brownian motion. Under the spell of LAURUS, we imagine what it would be like to measure life in seasons and harvests rather than clocks and clicks, to walk in hallowed paths and receive ancient wisdom, to suffer and cleanse the soul."
— Janet Fitch, author of White Oleander and Paint It Black, in The Los Angeles Review of Books
"For Russian literature, the glorification — indeed sanctification — of the irrational is anything but new, but here it is delivered with great aplomb and narrative charm. Indeed, the most infectious element of Eugene Vodolazkin’s book may be its faith in language as a kind of charm.... Many readers are likely to find the book enchanting, if not palliative."
— Boris Dralyuk in The TLS
“Vodolazkin is a beautiful storyteller… His fluctuations and riffs on language are entertaining and enriching — carefully transmuted into English by the able Lisa Hayden —and Arseny’s journey is a rumination on what it means to be human, to be Russian, to spend a lifetime seeking atonement. This is an epic journey novel in all the best traditions. There are countless colorful characters, exciting twists of fate, and profound truths in the protagonist’s words and deeds. And, through it all, there is a distinctly “Russian flavor” – something like The Idiot meets Canterbury Tales meets The Odyssey. Highly recommended.”
— Russian Life Magazine
“A novel about the life of a 15th-century Russian monk might sound an unlikely bestseller, but Eugene Vodolazkin’s extraordinary tale Lavrus became a literary sensation, won Russia’s Big Book award in 2013, and was shortlisted for numerous other prizes.... So what’s the appeal? Vodolazkin’s spiritual odyssey transcends history, fusing archaism and slang to convey the idea that 'time is a sort of misunderstanding.' … Vodolazkin explores multifaceted questions of ‘Russianness’ and concludes, like the 19th century poet Fyodor Tyutchev that Russia cannot be rationally understood. This is what leads him, with a gradual, but unstoppable momentum, to place faith and the transcendent human spirit at the center of his powerful worldview.”
—Russia Beyond the Headlines
"Steeped in religion, Arseny is a character who is almost too good to believe, and his supernatural diagnostic and healing powers too simplistic. Yet for all that, LAURUS is a gripping, weirdly fascinating read — very Russian, perhaps, in its fundamental outlooks and presentation, and certainly very carefully and well crafted (so also in Lisa Hayden’s English rendering.) B+, odd but compelling."
—Complete Review
"Vodolazkin succeeds in walking a thin line, achieving a fine balance between the ancient and archaic, and the ultra- modern; between the ironic and the tragic."
— Time Out
"Medieval Russia was a land trembling with religious fervor. Mystics, pilgrims, prophets, and holy fools wandered the countryside…. A new novel by the Russian medievalist Eugene Vodolazkin, LAURUS, recreates this fervent landscape and suggests why the era, its holy men, and the forests and fields of Muscovy retain such a grip on the Russian imagination.... In LAURUS Vodolazkin aims directly at the heart of the Russian religious experience and perhaps even at that maddeningly elusive concept that is cherished to the point of cliché: the Russian soul."
— Ken Kalfus in The New Yorker
"What kind of novel makes you want to enter into contemplative prayer after reading from its pages? I’ve never heard of one. But LAURUS is that kind of novel. It induces an awareness of the radical enchantment of the world, and of the grandeur of the soul’s journey through this life toward God. ... Holiness illuminates this novel like an icon lamp.... This is not a book about good and evil, but about what is real and eternal and what is false and temporal...Vodolazkin is himself a kind of wonder-worker, and LAURUS is without a doubt one of the most moving and mysterious books you will read in this or any other year. The world of its characters is spiritually spellbinding, and the reader should not be surprised to find that it evokes within himself a desire to pray, and thereby take what feeble steps he can to walk alongside the humble healer Arseny on his life’s pilgrimage."
—The American Conservative
"Winner of Russia's National Big Book Prize, this saga of 15th-century Russia captures both its harshness and its radiant faith in a narrative touched by the miraculous. Arseny is born in 1440 near the Kirillo-Belozersky Monastery and raised mostly by his grandfather, who teaches him to be a healer like himself. Plague takes the remaining family, and after further tragedy our hero launches on a pilgrimage across Europe, surviving violence, princes, and holy fools before becoming Brother Laurus. VERDICT Engaging sweep; for all readers.”
—Library Journal
“LAURUS is, in one breath, a timeless epic, trekking the well-trodden fields of faith, love, and the infinite depth of loss and search for meaning. In another, it is pointed, touching, and at times humorous, unpredictably straying from the path and leading readers along a wild chase through time, language, and medieval Europe. Vodolazkin’s experimental style envelopes the reader, drawing them into a world far from their own, yet indescribably intimate.... Kaleidoscopic in his language and reach, Vodolazkin takes us on a journey of discovery and absolution, threaded together through the various, often mystical lives of Arseny as a healer, husband, holy fool, pilgrim and hermit.... Love is shown through loss; death through agelessness; words through silence; the human in the divine. In life’s extremities, Vodolazkin has found a subtle balance and uses it to impressive effect."
— Asymptote Journal
"Vodolazkin, an expert in medieval folklore, transforms the dreadful past into a familiar stage on which to explore love, loss, and fervent perseverance.... In a stroke of brilliant storytelling, Vodolazkin forgoes historical accuracy and instead conjures a cyclical, eternal time by combining biblical quotes, Soviet bureaucratese, and linguistic conventions of the Middle Ages (in this translation, rendered into Old English). The result is a uniquely lavish, multilayered work that blends an invented hagiography with the rapturous energy of Dostoevsky’s spiritual obsessions."
—Booklist
"Bold, rich and complex, LAURUS deals with large issues: the concept of time, love and death, love and guilt."
—Historical Novel Review
"While it’s true that [Vodolazkin's] book manages to make the coarse, expansive, and frozen universe of the medieval Russia he reconstructs a seductive alternative to ours, this isn’t yet where it shines. LAURUS shines where it’s able to depict in vivid shades that elusory place where language and grace are indissolubly—even hypostatically—one."
—First Things Magazine
“Love, faith, and a quest for atonement are the driving themes of an epic, prizewinning Russian novel that, while set in the medieval era, takes a contemporary look at the meaning of time. Combining elements of fairy tale, parable, and myth, Vodolazkin 's second novel is a picaresque story exploring 15th-century existence with gravity and a touch of ironic humor. ... Unobtrusively translated, the novel's narration flows limpidly, touching humane depths, especially when depicting sickness, suffering, and death, which is often. Vodolazkin handles his long, unpredictable, sometimes-mystical saga and its diverse content with confident purpose, occasionally adding modern visions to the historical landscape, part of a conversation about discontinuous time. Traveling across Europe and Palestine and then back to Russia, Arseny, who will become Ustin, Amvrosy, and finally Laurus, will eventually complete his long, circular journey and reach a place of repose. With flavors of Umberto Eco and The Canterbury Tales, this affecting, idiosyncratic novel ... is an impressive achievement.”
— Kirkus Reviews
"Fifteenth-century Europe serves as the vast stage for a roving Russian healer who leaves his village on a journey of repentance, turmoil, and growth toward Jerusalem. Vodolazkin’s expertise in the medieval world rounds out this tale that defies the restrictions of this long-ago time and place in its treatment of universal human pains and regrets.”
— Nota Bene pick, World Literature Today
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About the Author
Eugene Vodolazkin was born in Kiev in 1964. An expert in Old Russian literature, Vodolazkin has worked in the department of Old Russian Literature at Pushkin House since 1990. He has numerous academic books and articles to his name, and has been awarded research and lectureship fellowships in Germany from both the Toepfer and Alexander von Humboldt Foundations. Vodolazkin’s debut novel, Solovyov and Larionov was shortlisted for the Andrei Bely Prize and The Big Book Prize. Laurus is Vodolazkin’s second novel. It won both of Russia's major literary awards, The Book Book Prize and the Yasnaya Polyana Award. Vodolazkin lives with his family in St Petersburg, Russia.
Lisa Hayden is a literary translator who lives in Scarborough, Maine. Her other translations from the Russian include Vladislav Otroshenko’s Addendum to a Photo Album and Marina Stepnova’s The Women of Lazarus. Her website, Lizok’s Bookshelf, focuses on contemporary Russian fiction. She received her MA in Russian literature at the University of Pennsylvania and lived in Moscow during 1992-1998.
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FYI - This book is also sold on Amazon with the following.
The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation Hardcover – March 14, 2017
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
"Already the most discussed and most important religious book of the decade." —David Brooks
In this controversial bestseller, Rod Dreher calls on American Christians to prepare for the coming Dark Age by embracing an ancient Christian way of life.
From the inside, American churches have been hollowed out by the departure of young people and by an insipid pseudo–Christianity. From the outside, they are beset by challenges to religious liberty in a rapidly secularizing culture. Keeping Hillary Clinton out of the White House may have bought a brief reprieve from the state’s assault, but it will not stop the West’s slide into decadence and dissolution.
Rod Dreher argues that the way forward is actually the way back—all the way to St. Benedict of Nursia. This sixth-century monk, horrified by the moral chaos following Rome’s fall, retreated to the forest and created a new way of life for Christians. He built enduring communities based on principles of order, hospitality, stability, and prayer. His spiritual centers of hope were strongholds of light throughout the Dark Ages, and saved not just Christianity but Western civilization.
Today, a new form of barbarism reigns. Many believers are blind to it, and their churches are too weak to resist. Politics offers little help in this spiritual crisis. What is needed is the Benedict Option, a strategy that draws on the authority of Scripture and the wisdom of the ancient church. The goal: to embrace exile from mainstream culture and construct a resilient counterculture.
The Benedict Option is both manifesto and rallying cry for Christians who, if they are not to be conquered, must learn how to fight on culture war battlefields like none the West has seen for fifteen hundred years. It's for all mere Christians—Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox—who can read the signs of the times. Neither false optimism nor fatalistic despair will do. Only faith, hope, and love, embodied in a renewed church, can sustain believers in the dark age that has overtaken us. These are the days for building strong arks for the long journey across a sea of night.
Holy Foolery
“St. Cyril of White Lake with View of the Kirillo-Belozersky Monastery,” eighteenth century. Found in the collection of the State Open-air Museum Kirillo-Belozersky Monastery.
Medieval Russia was a land trembling with religious fervor. Mystics, pilgrims, prophets, and holy fools wandered the countryside. Their wardrobe and grooming choices earned them names like Maksim the Naked and John the Hairy. Basil the Blessed walked through Moscow in rags, castigated the rich, exposed deceitful merchants, and issued prophecies, many of which proved correct, or close enough. St. Basil’s Cathedral in Red Square is named for him. Nil Sorsky was renowned for his asceticism and devotion, suggesting that, through self-discipline and prayer, you could directly commune with God, making irrelevant the extravagant rituals of Orthodoxy. Many ascetics were deemed “fools for Christ,” whether or not they behaved foolishly. Some were designated saints.
A new novel by the Russian medievalist Eugene Vodolazkin, “Laurus,” recreates this fervent landscape and suggests why the era, its holy men, and the forests and fields of Muscovy retain such a grip on the Russian imagination. Vodolazkin’s hero-mystic Arseny is a protagonist extrapolated from the little that is known about the lives and deeds of the famous holy men. Born in 1440, he’s raised by his herbalist grandfather Christofer near the grounds of the Kirillov Monastery, about three hundred miles north of Moscow. He becomes a renowned medicine man, faith healer, and prophet who “pelted demons with stones and conversed with angels.” He makes a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. He takes on new names, depending on how he will next serve God. The people venerate his humble spirituality. In “Laurus,” Vodolazkin aims directly at the heart of the Russian religious experience and perhaps even at that maddeningly elusive concept that is cherished to the point of cliché: the Russian soul.
So much of that soul seems to be wrapped up in Russia’s relationship with the natural world: intimate but wary, occult but practical. Arseny’s initial renown comes from his success as an herbalist and healer as he employs what he learned from his beloved grandfather. For wart removal, the best treatment is a sprinkling of ground cornflower seeds. For burns, apply linen with ground cabbage and egg white. The white root of a plant called hare’s ear cures erectile dysfunction. (“The drawback to this method was that the white root had to be held in the mouth at the crucial moment.”) At least some of Arseny’s remedies are suspect. (Translator Lisa C. Hayden warns, “Please don’t try these at home.”)
The remedies invoke an idea of nature as essentially friendly, or at least potentially helpful. Folk medicine remains popular in Russia to this day. Whether or not it’s effective, it connects an overwhelmingly urbanized population to the scythed fields and profound, spirit-dwelling forests of its antiquity. And Vodolazkin takes his holy fools seriously, offering a view of medieval Christianity that goes well beyond the appropriation of home remedies for religious purposes. Although Arseny cherishes Christofer’s birch-bark pharmaceutical texts, he doesn’t believe the herbs are responsible when the ill recover. (Often, they don’t.) The keys are prayer and faith. He bows to icons on a shelf. Incense burns. A vitalizing current runs from his hands into the core of the patient’s suffering. In “Laurus,” the depiction of faith is presented entirely without irony—a strategy that has become unusual among literary writers, but which is central to Vodolazkin’s effort to excavate what was meaningful from Russia’s distant past.
The faith of Vodolazkin’s holy fools is neither ecstatic, like many forms of Western Christianity, nor hierarchical, like Eastern Christianity, nor scholarly, like Judaism. Although the Greek-derived word doesn’t appear in “Laurus,” Arseny appears to embrace “Hesychasm,” the Byzantine religious movement in pursuit of inner peace. In his magisterial history of Russian culture, “The Icon and the Axe,” James H. Billington explains that the Hesychasts received “divine illumination” through “ascetic discipline of the flesh and silent prayers of the spirit.” This often required years of isolation and silence. Arseny accepts the challenge after a series of trials, most significantly the death of his beloved Ustina, a young woman who had found refuge in his log house after her family was lost to the plague. His botched attempt to deliver their child tests the limits of prayer and folk medicine: “The blood was flowing from the womb and he could not stanch it. He took some finely grated cinnabar in his fingers and went as deeply into Ustina’s female places as he could.” Arseny acknowledges his malpractice, but not the fact that she’s gone forever. Shattered by her death, he journeys to the town of Pskov, in what was then Lithuania. He spends decades without speaking, and is designated one of the region’s three holy fools. Most of his silent communion is not with God, but with Ustina’s spirit.
The other element of being a Russian holy man was a taste for prophecy—”dominating all other manifestations of eccentric sanctity,” according to Sergei Ivanov, author of “Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond,” the most authoritative English-language account of the phenomenon. “For many holy fools the power to predict is virtually the only quality mentioned in the sources.” Arseny looks at the ill and knows, regardless of his ministrations, who will survive and who will die. As a boy fool-in-training, he peers into the fire of the stove and sees the image of an elderly man. The aged Arseny will gaze into another fire at the unlined face of himself as a boy.
With so many of the blessed running around, fifteenth-century Russia, as Vodolazkin depicts it, is the golden age of prophets. Similarly ragged and unkempt, they stand at the entrances of markets. They appear at christenings and weep for the truncated lives they foretell. They sleep in cemeteries. Since there are seven days in the week, they figure that God has ordained seven millennia of human existence. Thus they widely announce that the world will end seven thousand years after its creation in 5508 B.C.—in other words, in A.D. 1492, just around the corner. Beset by plague and pestilence, poverty and hunger, the Russians already sense themselves on the brink of annihilation. They’re receptive. In the West, especially in Spain, other Christians similarly anticipate the apocalypse.
Arseny’s Italian friend Ambrogio, who has come to Russia because of its hospitality to prophets, predicts floods to the day; he can also see within a Soviet linen shop, circa 1951. But his visions of 1492 are confused. “On the one hand, a new continent would be discovered, on the other, the end of the world was expected in Rus’.” Ambrogio joins Arseny for his journey to Jerusalem. Passing through Poland, on their way to the Mediterranean, the two holy men reach the small town of Oświęcim. Ambrogio says, “Believe me, O Arseny, this place will induce horrors in centuries. But its gravity can be felt, even now.”
The prophets put forward a peculiar explanation for their extraordinary visions. They don’t necessarily attribute it to their spirituality. They see soothsaying as a kind of physical phenomenon, related to either the circularity of time or to its illusoriness. Ambrogio goes as far as to say that there’s really no such thing as time. The sense of its passing “is given to us by the grace of God so we will not get mixed up, because a person’s consciousness cannot take in all events at once. We are locked up in time because of our weakness.”
The semi-rational notions of the two mystics resonate in a particularly contemporary register, as fifteenth-century Russian religious thought grazes against the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics. Some current-day scientists, particularly the heterodox British physicist Julian Barbour, have speculated that the theories imply our universe exists in a kind of frozen space-time, in which everything that has ever happened and everything that will ever happen is occurring right now, in a single gigantic instant. The world has already ended. Kurt Vonnegut’s Tralfamadorians told the holy wanderer Billy Pilgrim something like that, too. If correct, the human experience of time flowing like a river is more a function of our physiology: a singularly intense hallucination. The minutes may indeed pass by the grace of God.
In “Laurus,” Vodolazkin conveys the simultaneity of existence in his use of language, which, as the translator notes, “blends archaic words, comic remarks, quotes from the Bible, bureaucratese [and] chunks of medieval texts.” Hayden has tried to do justice to these stylistic flourishes by mixing Old English locutions and spelling—”yonge,” for young, “wombe” for womb, and “sayde” for said—with contemporary slang. After Arseny gets beat up for exposing the local baker’s transgressions, his fellow holy fool Foma warns, “Your clock will be cleaned again, my friend.” At the Church of the Dormition of the Mother of God, dust motes caught in a ray of sunlight swirl “in a pensive Brownian dance”—a reference to molecular Brownian motion explained by Albert Einstein in 1905.
We live in an age in which the pre-modern frequently comes flush up against the modern and the post-. But Russia and Russian life seem to be especially prone to existing on several planes of time at once. Occasionally, certain Russians cry out that they can see the future. Others dwell in the Byzantine. They may pass you on a Moscow street, robed and bearded. On an autumn walk through the countryside, you may get five bars on your phone while a distant onion dome rises above a stand of birches, a kerchiefed woman on the side of the road sells a kilo of pickles, other women scout for mushrooms in the woods, and in the fields there is a humming swish!, accompanied by the quick gray blur of a long, curving blade on a stick.
