Laurus: The International Bestseller

I am rarely at a loss for words, but it is especially difficult to find the right ones to express how luminous, how wondrous, is this book. Often I would set it down on my lap, dazed and dazzled. As a religious believer, I generally don't care for religious fiction, because it is very, very difficult to represent the life of the spirit accurately. The only fiction I've ever encountered that does this as well as "Laurus" are the Elder Zosima chapters of "The Brothers Karamazov". But don't think for a moment that "Laurus" is only a book for and about mystical medieval Russian Orthodoxy. It is a book about the mystery of life, and how, out of the ruins of our humanity, can emerge a goodness so pure we call it holy.

My tenth-grade English teacher once reproached me by quoting the aphorism "We don't judge a classic; it judges us." Whether or not Laurus is a classic will not be known for a century or two, but it is of sufficient weight and complexity to judge the reader. Hence the five stars. Who am I to doubt?Russia underwent three traumas in the last century--the Revolution, the forced industrialization and repression of Stalinism, and the Second World War. The first two were accompanied by the worst persecution of Christians in history. The demise of communism has led to a revival of the Russian Orthodox Church, with the support of the state. My recent read, Everyday Saints, and this book were both best sellers, and bear witness to this trend. In fact, Vodolazhkin was secretly baptized as a child, and feared exposure as a Christian in his university days.He has written a book which expresses the legendary Russian soul and certain aspects of the Russian version of the Orthodox world view.Set in the Fifteenth Century, with occasional leaps to other times, the book traces the life of his hero, in four stages, represented by his four names, Arseny, Ustin, Amvrosy, and Laurus. Arseny metamorphoses throughout the book, from a rural healer, to a "fool for Christ," a pilgrim, and a monk, among other things. In the course of the book, we are treated to elements of historical fiction--a recreation of the era in rural Russia, of magic realism with leaps in time all kinds of strange and miraculous events, a meditation on the meaning of time, an introduction to many aspects of Russian Orthodoxy, and a touch of the picaresque, though without the cynicism of, say, the Lazarillo de Tormes.I have no Russian, but I take it on faith that there is much word play with archaic vocabulary and constructions. These the translator has tried to signify by introducing strange spellings of words from time to time. I think that experiment fails, rather like a gift shop that tries to project antiquity by labeling itself "Ye Olde." That said, the book is quite readable, with short chapters, live prose, and a rapid unfolding of events.It is no doubt the case that this book is not for everyone. People who are impatient with things religious, feet set in the concrete of their skepticism, might find this book annoying. Such readers' willful suspension of disbelief will require something of an effort. If one is interested in the Middle Ages, the Russian soul, or Orthodoxy, you are likely to find the book rewarding.Someday soon, I may read it again.

To me, this seems to be a case where I liked the author’s intentions, but didn’t like how these intentions were carried out in the book. Our protagonist, Laurus, wear many hats and carries several names throughout the book, and perhaps that is a symbolic gesture to his always searching for meaning, identity and redemption.There is a rambling and a bit incoherent quality to much of the beginning parts to Laurus, and for that reason alone, it was sort of a slog and struggle to try to push onward. This is especially evident in the first two sections. There is a bit of structure in the opening part, where we learn the back story of the protagonist and his uncle, and how he begins his life journey, as well as the tragedy that inspires him to begin his quest. However, in the second part of the book, we are hit with episode after episodes of healing and such, and it just seemed a little too random, aimless and sporadic.As far as the text itself, I found some of book clunky with wording and expressions and I think it was just a translation issue or something. I also wasn’t a big fan of some of the magical realism that came out of nowhere.Also, there are several shifts in time that seemingly come out of nowhere and are quite random. One reviewer mentioned how it felt like stories were just thrown in in any order with no relevance or coherence. I agree with that assessment, especially as we proceed into the second part of the book. That being said, I think the best parts of the book are the final ones, and those made it worth the reading experience. I did enjoy several parts, such as the latter sections of Arseny’s pilgrimage to Jerusalem and the spiritual and physical quest he undertakes to get there. Much of this journey is a sense of coming to terms with his guilt over a particular tragedy, and seeking redemption. So, to me, this section not only flowed with much more structure and precision, but the themes were more prevalent as well. I heard many comparisons to the likes of Umberto Eco and Fyodor Dostoevsky. However, I think those comparisons were a little too ambitious. Not a bad read, but just a tad too uneven and clunky.

There are books which entertain us, books which edify us, and there are some works of literature - given an honest disposition on our part - which may change our lives and the way we look at the world. Such, for many people, are The Divine Comedy, King Lear, and The Four Quartets of T.S. Eliot.There is now another to add to that canon. It was published in Russia in 2013 and by last autumn it appeared in English, just one of more than 20 languages into which it has now been translated. It is Laurus - as in laurel, I think. It's author, Evegeny Vodolazkin, is a 51 year-old Russian medieval scholar and his own story is no less impressive or inspiring than the novel he has written for us.It became a literary sensation when published in Russia and won its two major literary awards in that year. This, Vodolazkin’s second novel (though his debut in English), captures the religious and social flavour of fifteenth-century Russia, tracking the life of a healer and “holy fool”. It is described by some as a post-modern synthesis of Bildungsroman, travelogue, hagiography and love story.From almost every angle in which you might position yourself to look at this novel, it is exceptional. It really is post-modern - but not in any of the multitude of senses in which that slippery term has ever been used before. Vodolazkin even questions the use of the term, because for him post-modernism is just a game that plays with quoting literature of the past, but has no grounding in anything real.Vodolazkin certainly ignores narrative conventions. But he does so to create, not to confuse, disrupt or destroy. It's mission - whether the author's intention is missionary or not - is to liberate. And it truly does so. It often ignores the conventions by which we deal with time and place. But if it does, it does so to give us a deeper and more profound sense of both - eternal and universal.Set in the late Middle Ages, its protagonist, Arseny, born in 1440, was raised near the Kirillov Monastery, about three hundred miles north of Moscow. He becomes a renowned herbal healer, faith healer, and prophet who “pelted demons with stones and conversed with angels.” He makes a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, encountering miracles, murder and mayhem on the way. He takes on new names, depending on how he will next serve God. His last name is Laurus. The people venerate his humble spirituality.American columnist Rod Dreher describes this as "an earthy novel", a novel filled with the sounds, smells, violence, superstition, and fanaticism of the Middle Ages. It reminds one of Andrei Tarkovsky's cinematic masterpiece set in the same era, Andrei Rublev.Vodolazkin has what we would probably call, borrowing from his own terminology, a personalist view of history.Laurus is an exploration of the human condition in our own time but looked at with the wisdom of the people of another time. In truth, It reveals the deep humanism of the Middle Ages. For Vodolazkin this age was much more humanistic than modernity.In one of the most moving passages in the book - and there are many of those - the medieval sensibility speaks to modern man showing us that there truly is nothing new under the sun.The sequence, and the events which follow, are central in the entire structure of the novel and in it's spell-binding denouement.In a year of great hunger, the young woman Anastasia came to Laurus after losing her virginity. She prostrated herself before Laurus, weeping, and said: I feel that I am carrying a baby in my womb but I cannot bear the baby without a husband. For when the child is born, it will be called the fruit of my sin.What do you want, woman? Laurus asked.You know yourself, O Laurus, what I want, but I am afraid to say it to you.I do know, woman. Just as you know how I will answer you. So do tell me, why did you come to me?Because if I go to the wise woman in Rukina Quarter, everyone will find out about my sin. But you can simply pray and then the fruit of my sin will leave me the same way it entered.Laurus’s gaze rose along the tops of the pine trees and got lost in the leaden skies. Snowflakes froze on his eyelashes. The first snow had covered the glade.I cannot pray for that. Prayer should carry the force of conviction, otherwise it is not effective. And you are asking me to pray for murder.Anastasia slowly rose from her knees. She sat on a fallen tree and held up her cheeks with her fists.I am an orphan and now is a time of hunger and I cannot feed the child enough. How can you not understand?Keep the child and everything will turn out fine. Simply believe me, I know this.You are killing both me and the baby, Anastasia said before leaving him.“The massacres we have seen in the 20th century, no one in the Middle Ages could have imagined", Vodvolaskin has said. "Despite what you might have heard, a human life was estimated very highly in the Middle Ages. When they say that humanism appeared only in modernity, it is not true.”He explains how it was a special kind of humanism. The humanism of modernity sees the human being as the measure of all things, but medieval people were convinced that this measure was given by God. For him, it’s an essential difference. Echoing his great compatriot Alexander Solzynitsyn’s critique of the Renaissance, and the subsequent moves to put man at the centre of the universe in the Enlightenment, he says that in modernity the human being is at the top of the hierarchy. In the Middle Ages, at the top of the hierarchy was God. “In our post-Christian society, God very often is not present in our life at all.”In a seminar in London last Autumn, Vodolazkin described Laurus in this way: “To quote (Mikhail) Lermontov,” he said, “it is ‘the history of a man’s soul’.” The book’s subtitle is, intriguingly, “a non-historical novel”. He is quick to dissociate himself from historical fiction. It is ultimately “a book about absence,” he said, “a book about modernity”. There are two ways to write about modernity, he explains: the first is by writing about the things we have; the second, by writing about those things we no longer have. This is the way of Laurus and for those who have ears to hear it may be a way back to all that has been lost.Vodolazkin was born and raised in the Soviet era. For him studying medieval history and literature was a way to escape from the gulag that was Societ Russia, a kind of emmigraton. For him medieval history was the only piece of reality where the Soviet mentality was absent in the 1980s when he was growing up.His parents were agnostics and he was not baptized as a child. It was a period of my personal paganism, he says. "As a child, I asked someone, some unknown person, to help me, please. When I was 16, I was baptized; a movement inside me led me to that point. Where did it come from? When I was 14 or 15, I discovered death." Little children, he says, know that death exists, but they don’t believe it concerns them. They think that a death is a personal misunderstanding, or something that happens to this particular person who died. He experienced a terrible fear when he confronted death – not that he would die and would not be, but rather that everything is pointless without God.In Laurus, its New Yorker reviewer tells us, Vodolazkin aims directly at the heart of the Russian religious experience. He may, but he does much more than that. He goes to the heart of the hunger for religion in every soul.This is a book of great complexity, with archaic flourishes which sometimes baffle the reader but are all part of the meaning of the whole. According to one reviewer, “Laurus cannot be faulted for its ambition or for its poignant humanity. It is a profound, sometimes challenging, meditation on faith, love and life’s mysteries.”It is truly astounding that just a few decades after Russia’s emergence from the bitter wilderness of soviet atheism, a voice and a spirit like this can speak to us with such authority, spiritual sensibility and wisdom.

I was looking forward to reading this book, but not so when it came to it. I found the translation signally lacking in musicality, flat and louche, a kind of street talk, vulgar English that has no place in a decent book. Clearly the translator is not a writer and has merely copied out the words so to speak from one language to another, losing all the gist of the first in the second. The use of old Russian and olde Englishe would have worked had it been left to someone who was familiar with it and not someone who was not. Pity.

Beautifully written tale of a medieval healer with special powers and his journeys throughout Russia and beyond. Almost has a Candide like feel to it especially as his travels bring him back to where he started! Lovely book - the translation must have been extremely difficult into English as he uses many medieval morals and tales which would be easily understood in the original Russian but not so easily translated into English. Having said that, the translation is very powerful and has a simple, almost fable like quality to it. The author portrays the strong Russian medieval spiritual tradition which in the modern secular world we would find literally "mystifying". Perhaps we need it as an antidote to the highly secular society that is fast becoming the so called"norm" throughout the world.

We quickly learn that Laurus in serving others serves his God. He has a Franciscan type of love of nature learned from his grandfather who thought him the healing power of plants and herbs. This is set in the middle- ages when the power of the spoken word was also often as strong as the healing plants used.Healing is a constant theme in Laurus. Laurus suffers when his immediate intuition is that nothing can be done for someone. We care too. He takes on the role of different characters as he ages and moves to different regions, towns and villages. It is set mostly in middle age Russia. His journey is not only physical but also spiritual. The author explains how the concept of time different back then and events and experiences of time was something fluid and changing.Laurus lives a humble life but also experiences a profound love when he takes pity on a young hungry banished woman who visits him at a time of the plague. He holds tightly to their love keeping her secret but then is struck profoundly by events that unfold. He carries guilt for the rest of his life. He hopes that by healing those that come into his presence he can be forgiven. Laurus is a type of healer or middle-age doctor to the poor and rich alike. His skills and successes mean he quickly gains fame and reputation in the different abodes he takes. One mayor who awards him for helping heal some family members soon learns he used the money to buy bread for the village poor.Another path he takes is with an educated noble Italian on a perilous pilgrimage to Jerusalem. For some reason they are convinced that some important secret about the date for the end of the world awaits them. This was a time where myths of people with heads in their stomachs and other folklore were strong. It is Laurus trust in his God that means he prays for shelter along their way.This sense of a journey and way is constant throughout. The novel is set in middle age Russia and the text is comfortable, mostly well written and fluid. It is not as challenging as others here have suggested by using older English words.You end up caring about Laurus and his life. You have empathy and compassion for those who come to see him. Even when a disturbed bear in winter arrives, Laurus offers his cave to but he quietly hopes this hairy visitor will soon find his own.Recommended for people with an interest in the middle-ages, and nature. It is a glimpse into where modern society have come from. A gentle and interesting life story of a time where Laurus and his fateful powers were a light onto lifes dark shadows. His gifts are still relevant today.

This book is like nothing I've ever read, combining religious themes with historical fact, pilgrimage and incredible, humorous characters. It has an amazing depth of knowledge, and reminds me of Chaucer's tales, Rabelais and Russian epic novels, all rolled into one. It is a literary feast, a celebration and an entertainment. Wonderful