Transcriber: Amanda Chu Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
Why is it that we read novels or indeed write them?
I suspect that one reason we read novels
is that we're all of us aware, either guiltily or joyfully or gratefully,
that we discover who we are and what we are
partly by telling and retelling stories about ourselves.
We most of us know what it's like
to reinvent ourselves as we tell our story.
And so when we read a novel,
one of the things that's going on is that we're watching a person, a self,
in the process of being constructed as a story unfolds.
So one reason for reading novels is sheer curiosity:
We want to know how stories get told because we like doing it ourselves.
We want to know,
because we want to understand a bit better,
what it's like to turn into a person, to become a self.
But of course,
a novel isn't just somebody else telling a story,
let alone telling a story about themselves.
We know that the storyteller
knows more than the character in the story can ever know.
We know that there's irony shot through every novel.
The storyteller may say,
as some great novelists have said of their characters,
that they're surprised by what the characters do.
Tolstoy famously said he was astonished
when Anna Karenina decided to commit suicide,
but we know, actually, they are in control.
And if at the end of that enormous book,
Tolstoy had decided
that Anna Karenina should live happily ever after,
he could have done it,
and Anna Karenina wouldn't be in any position to object.
So, also when we read a novel,
we're looking at insecurity,
at complicated layers of meaning and possibility.
We're looking not just at a story of how a life unfolds
and how a person gets made;
we're also looking at the very different kinds of meaning,
the very different kinds of trajectory that could emerge.
You get a sense of the fragility and the oddity
of human identity.
All of which adds up to quite a good set of reasons
for reading novels
if we're interested in people, yourself, the world,
or even, in my line of business, God.
So I want to talk a bit about one particular recent novel
by a Russian novelist, Eugene Vodolazkin.
He's a professional scholar of the Middle Ages in Eastern Europe,
which might not immediately suggest that he's a brilliant novelist, but he is.
And here's his novel called "Laurus," which is about 15th century Russia.
I've chosen to talk about this
partly because I think it's a brilliant novel,
partly because it unfolds
some of the issues I've flagged up at the beginning as general questions.
It's a story about a man growing up in central Russia in the 15th century,
an orphan brought up by his grandfather,
trained by his grandfather in traditional healing methods
among other things.
Grandfather dies.
The young man himself becomes a healer.
He forms a relationship with a young woman who turns up in the village one day.
The young woman dies in childbirth, so does the child,
and the young man is consumed with guilt and terror and self-reproach
about what he might have done and couldn't have done.
He has to come to terms with his own powerlessness
and his own ignorance -
an ignorance which has actually caused the death of two other people.
So in a way, he's faced with a question
of how he can go on being the same self
when that self is apparently guilty - guilty of the death of others.
What happens next
is a very different kind of reinvention from the one we often think of
in terms of our own experience or of novels.
The young man, Arseny, does indeed reinvent himself.
He decides that the rest of his life
has, in some way, got to be a life that represents in the world
the person he has loved and lost;
he's got to live a life on behalf of Ustina, his dead lover,
and her child.
You could say he reinvents himself to give space, to give room,
to that lost other person.
When he reinvents himself,
he's not trying to make himself more secure, more interesting,
more sexy, more powerful;
he's trying to reinvent himself
in order to open up space for an other.
And he does this in various ways:
he becomes a wanderer, the pilgrim,
he becomes what in Russia was called a yuródivyy, a holy fool -
somebody who abandons all notion of respectability and success,
who lives a life which is,
to all outward appearances, stupid, outrageous and unconventional
but is, in its stupidity and outrageousness,
a kind of selflessness.
He arrives in a neighboring city, the city of Pskof, in central Russia,
where there are already two holy fools working hard at it,
and one of them says this to him,
"Be her and be yourself simultaneously.
Be outrageous.
Being pious is easy and pleasant. Go ahead and make yourself hated.
Don't let the people of this town sleep. They're lazy and incurious. Amen."
In other words, he's encouraging Arseny
not only to take on himself the unfinished life of the person he loves
but also to be himself in that;
to find himself in giving room to the dead Ustina,
knowing that, in this, he will be offensive to many people.
It will seem a ridiculous way to live.
"Disown your identity," says the other holy fool to Arseny,
"Disown yourself completely."
Well, in those terms, it's a very frightening command,
but as the novel unfolds,
you can see how this giving space to the other,
this reinventing of a self that's not defensive, aggressive and anxious,
is actually a flowering, a maturing at the same time.
We have descriptions of Arseny as a healer,
"Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.
Doctoring experience tells him
medicaments are not the most important part of treatment.
Arseny does not help everyone.
He hears out the patient
but turns away from him when he feels powerless to help.
Sometimes he will press his forehead to the patient's forehead
and tears will flow from his eyes.
He shares the patient's pain with him and, to some degree, his death too.
Arseny’s heart fills with grief because he understands
that the world does not remain the same after a patient passes away,
but even the patients Arseny cannot cure feel benefit from interacting with him -
they think their pain reduces after meeting with Arseny
and their fear lessons along with the pain.
In his exploration of pain, he gets to the very bottom of things."
That healing life,
that life which is grounded
in a giving room to the other who's been lost,
the other who's been frustrated,
who’s been crushed by suffering.
In that giving room,
Arseny becomes not only more fully himself
but a place where very many others can find life and hope.
It's a theme that keeps coming back in Russia,
in the Russian Christian world, and in the Russian literary world.
One of the great 19th-century Saints of Russia, Seraphim of Sarov, said,
“If you have peace in your heart,
thousands of people find their healing around you.”
And Arseny in this book is that kind of person.
He continues his wandering.
He continues his holy folly.
He goes on pilgrimage to Jerusalem with another holy fool.
He comes back to Russia.
He finally becomes a monk and takes the monastic name of Laurus,
"Лавр" in Russian, the title of the book.
He goes on, we might say, reinventing himself,
but he goes on reinventing himself
in a way that consistently gives more and more space.
Russian novels of the 19th and 20th centuries
often have figures like this in them,
figures whose withdrawal so that others may find life for hope around them,
who are, in the eyes of the world, failures
or who are, in the eyes of the world, impossibly eccentric.
These figures turn out to be the ones
who actually bring something new or different
into a world where people are constantly trying to reinvent themselves
so as to be safer
with fewer open doors around them.
In all the great novels of Dostoevsky,
you will find this principle coming back again and again -
figures who somehow change the landscape
by refusing to close in on themselves, by refusing to defend themselves.
Their stories, their novelistic unfolding,
are stories about those
whose reinvention is a kind of self-stripping
or self-denying;
they become selves
by not being the kind of self you expect them to be.
And behind this is the long tradition in Russia of these holy fools,
these wild and eccentric figures,
who appear quite often in Russian chronicles,
sometimes walking naked through the streets in midwinter,
sometimes throwing stones at churches and praying in pubs -
people who constantly run across the ordinary conventions
of being holy
and by doing that, open up something that would otherwise not be there.
So it's an interesting question to think about
in relation not just to this novel but to novels as a whole:
As you read a really good novel,
what is it you're tracing in the stories of the persons there?
Processes of reinvention
that shrink and narrow and restrict who people are and what they can be.
Those are the tragic stories,
stories where suffering, frustration, the sheer difficulty of being human
repeatedly drives people not inwards but outwards.
They're not exactly comedies.
Though this is incidentally a very funny book
as well as a very serious one,
like Dostoevsky’s books, not comedies but not tragedies either -
narratives of how people become selves, become persons
not by spraying out the borders of their territory
like some animal putting its scent all around,
but people who understand that the real reinvention,
the reinvention that matters, is a kind of letting go.
A good novel will raise questions like that for us.
A good drama also.
Think of Shakespeare's dramas in that light -
dramas of closing up, dramas of opening out,
dramas that are all about the possibilities
and the relationships being shut down one by one,
dramas that are about unexpected, sometimes outrageous moments
where new possibilities emerge, where boundaries are crossed,
where what you thought was over returns,
the person you thought was dead is alive.
And something opens up.
Drama and fiction are, it seems, pretty universal human activities.
Universal, I've suggested,
partly because we are fascinated by our own stories,
much too fascinated most of the time,
but if we engage with the narrative of drama and fiction,
part of what we might hope to draw from it, from that engagement,
and to draw from the really brilliant,
the really searching bits of drama and fiction,
is that question of how we exercise most creatively
our creative power of telling stories about ourselves.
Do we exercise that power
in creating the safe, the impressive, the successful version of ourselves
or do we, like Arseny in this remarkable book,
go on reinventing ourselves
not as the giants and heroes and saints we'd like to be,
but as those willing to give more and more space
for the life of others to come alive in us or around us.
Thank you very much.