Book Review: Laurus

A review of Eugene Vodolazkin's Medieval Masterpiece

I’m part of a monthly book club where I live in Austin, TX. We choose books democratically (those present at a meeting may propose a book, and all those present may vote for any two of the books proposed). If one’s book is chosen, it’s customary to write a short introduction before the discussion of the book. This review is a slightly modified version of what I wrote for the discussion of a book I had much looked forward to reading and discussing, Laurus, by Eugene Vodolazkin. I proposed it to the club on the strength of the fact that two unrelated friends told me last calendar year that it was the best book they had read in 2023, but I wasn’t entirely sure what I would find in reading it. The experience was powerful, and it’s a story I’m already certain I will return to many times. This review was written for an audience who had read the book and contains small spoilers.

I became Orthodox a little more than a year ago, a journey that was, for me, slow, hard to understand, and seemingly non-linear. That made Vodolazkin’s Laurus a deeply meaningful book for me. I am happy to assert without reservation that it is a masterpiece. It is the entire story of a life, and that life (I think both in the experience of the reader and the character who lives it) is slow, hard to understand, and seemingly non-linear.

Vodolazkin is concerned principally with the way that human healing unfolds in time. Fundamentally, the answer is simple: every person who undergoes the process of salvation lives out Adam’s fall in their own heart and later on is reconciled to God by becoming a Christian, a little Christ. The journey is Adam to Jesus; man to God-man. But wait. What if someone isn’t granted time to become a little Christ? What if they die while still Adam? Worse: what if it’s my fault? What could I possibly do about it, and is there really any “my doing” apart from God’s doing? Uh oh. This isn’t so simple all of a sudden.

Prizing apart these questions, Vodolazkin answers at least some of them pretty clearly. As Elder Nikandr coaxes Arseny (the main character) from death back into life, he tells Arseny frankly, “there is God’s eternal mercy, we trust in His mercy. But mercy should be a reward for effort.” (p. 90) Laurus discovers likewise later that “Any healing arises first and foremost from belief in it.” (p. 354) So, there’s synergy here. I can’t save or heal anyone with my own effort, but if I don’t do or believe, then nothing will be done in or through me. A babe in the womb can’t do anything to sustain its own life, but it must still act at an organic level to receive life from the mother. The mother and baby’s “doings” are distinct, but synergistic.

But how does this work, characters in the novel often wonder? After all, God’s grace is supposed to be dispensed from an eternal oeconomia, while we make choices in time. The worry, as Arseny deftly states it: “If history is a scroll in the hands of the Creator, does that mean that everything I think and do is my Creator’s thinking and doing, rather than mine?” (p. 210) Noticeably, his friend Ambrogio says, “no”, but seems unable to explain why that wouldn’t be so. Twelve pages later, as Ambrogio is pressing his own philosophical problem (viz. whether an herb is properly called “praiseworthy” for remaining free of sin, given its inability to sin in the first place), we get what’s likely an answer to both problems, from the mouth of a nameless monk of the Kiev Caves: “…one must consciously rid oneself of sins…And that’s all there is to it. One must be more like God, you know, not expound on things.” (p. 223)

That (sort of) answers the question of how God’s grace and my effort interact in my own salvation, but there’s the question of what I can do for the salvation of another. What does my salvation have to do with my wife’s, my children’s, or with any of my other neighbors’? The answer, Arseny discovers, is that these have quite a lot to do with one another. It’s natural to learn this in the context of marriage, since we’re tied to the fate of our spouse in ways that are hard not to see. Arseny learns to repent for his part in everyone’s sins, though. Soon after leaving the town of Belozersk, he repents for the life of his recently deceased traveling companion, even though that companion had treated him roughly and Arseny seems faultless in the companion’s death. By the end of his life, Laurus accepts responsibility for another man’s infidelity, an act of repentance for his neighbor’s sin that brings Laurus himself, but also his love, Ustina, and their child, some measure of redemption on earth.

Ultimately, the Orthodox anthropology (and thus soteriology) says that no man is an island. Recognizing this, Vodolazkin is in unison with Dostoevsky, whose Father Zosima teaches in The Brothers Karamazov that “each of us is undoubtedly guilty on behalf of all and for all on earth, not only because of the common guilt of the world, but personally, each one of us, for all people and for each person on this earth.” Only once we acknowledge this does Zosima teach that “each of us will be able to gain the whole world by love and wash away the world’s sins with his tears.” This is both incredibly weighty and more hopeful than we may have ever expected. One is guilty not only for one’s own sins but the sins of the entire world: each Christian must confess along with St. Paul that he is the “worst of sinners.” But the upshot is that our salvation can ripple through the whole human race. If no man is an island, then all of the human race is connected and can be reached by true repentance, wherever we might find it.

The path of salvation is the same for all. The question is whether we’re on it, and how we might help others climb the ladder. Image via Wikimedia Commons

This leads naturally back to the concern of time: What’s the timeline on human redemption, or at least something more redemptive than what you see driving on I-35? Of course, Vodolazkin has warned us to be more like God and not expound on things, but he sure says a lot about time in this book. As Ambrogio puts it at one point, “people are free, history isn’t.” Vodolazkin describes time as a spiral in the book, but on a grand scale he also seems to think of it as a chiasm. Even as Ambrogio tells Amerigo Vespucci that people in Rus expect the world to end in 1492, Ambrogio wonders whether, “the discovery of the new continent was the beginning of a lengthy, drawn-out end of the world,”—say one that lasts 7,000 years. You can almost hear Vodolazkin whispering that last part with a chuckle.

Well, whether the end of the world is 2032 or 8492, I should stop expounding. The main theme of this book is that healing is possible. It is possible, namely, from within the substitutionary life presented to us by the Cross. And that goes for everyone. One of the saints whose lives I have been most impacted by reading and meditating on is Saint James the Faster of Phoenicia. St. James, like Arseny, was granted the gift of healing. However, after remaining faithful for many years, he fell into sexual sin, taking advantage of a maiden whose parents had brought her to him for healing from insanity. He did heal her and afterwards took advantage of her. Not only that, but in order to hide his sin, he murdered her and threw her body into a river. I know only the outline of St. James’ life, not enough to know exactly how he went from fallen monastic and murderer to saint. (It is known that he spent the next ten years of his life residing in an open grave and interceding for all by his prayers.) What I do know about St. James, and what Vodolazkin paints in such stunning color and light, is that even “the greatest spiritual giants can be overthrown; and how, through sincere and contrite repentence, God, according to his mercy, forgives even the greatest sins and does not punish those who punish themselves.” (Prologue of Ohrid, p. 263)

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