I am not writing about all the books I have read and certainly not about all the films I have watched, sometimes there are such "copies" about which there is simply nothing to say, they are so faded and inexpressive both in form and content, sometimes it seems that everything has been said before you for a long time, it happens that the work simply does not get into the mood and passes "on the fly", then you do not want to scold it, but you will not be able to praise it. There was a special situation with the "Laurel": it is insanely difficult for me to evaluate this book.
In modern philosophy, there is an opinion that today is the New Middle Ages, and although the hypothesis about NS appeared almost a century ago, it has been actively developed and discussed in the last few years, at the same time significantly changing the concept.
If we talk about the New Middle Ages regarding art and even literature in particular, then two things are extremely important here - the death of the author and the death of god: in the Middle Ages, authorship was either not important or lost, Roland Barthes proclaimed the death of the author in 1967, and since then he has not "resurrected", as the Internet reminds us daily, in which sometimes even major analytical articles in the media remain unsigned.
What can we say about memes and jokes stolen from Twitter; there is no point arguing that medieval art revolved around God and religion, the twentieth century reflected on the Nietzschean statement, experienced this trauma, comparable only to the truth about Santa Claus, accidentally overheard by a child before the New Year, and for a while forgot, the twenty-first pulled the idol out of the closet again, and not only returned religious wars, but also regressed thinking somewhere in the the pre-Nietzschean years, so the word "spirituality" began to make me sick.
Evgeny Vodolazkin with his "Laurel" fit into this whole new medieval history even more successfully than George Martin and HBO with their "Game of Thrones", whose mediaeval nature is more than obvious: "Laurel", which takes place in Russia in the 15th century, is a life and is dedicated to a man who, due to the deepest sense of his own guilt, completely destroys his personality, trying to live for others, but not for himself.
The hero of "Lara" Arseny was raised by his grandfather, a herbalist and healer who lived on the outskirts of a village near Pskov. After burying his grandfather, he continued his work, but one day a young girl Ustinya appeared on the threshold of his house, as if out of nowhere, whom Arseny later named his wife.
During childbirth, the girl dies, the child does not survive, and the healer, who hid his beloved from the villagers, reproaches himself for not being able to help them himself and did not ask for help from others. From that moment on, Arseny says that he is Ustin and passionately wants only one thing - to live his life for Ustinya in order to atone for his guilt...
Evgeny Vodolazkin is a specialist in ancient Russian literature, a student of Dmitry Sergeyevich Likhachev, an employee of the Pushkin House, and therefore in everyday literature he is like a fish in water. Does this mean that in the "Lavra" he recreates the familiar life of the saint? Not at all.
Structurally, yes, this is a classic version of the saint's biography, in which the hero moves from the bottom up in front of the reader and turns from the mundane and sinful into a kind of spiritual and moral ideal, but everything else is more like a postmodern game with the literature of medieval Russia.
The author deliberately erases all boundaries between the world of Arseny/Ustin/Ambrose/Lavra and the reader's world, proving that it is, in fact, the same world. First of all, the language works for this: the Old Russian in the novel is intertwined with modern words and expressions, the fools quickly jump from "I am" to "hear, you", and for comparative turns, the mention of realities from modernity is often used.
The second is a composition: several short stories are inserted into the linear story about Arseny's life, the heroes of which are people born in the twentieth century, but connected with the events of the main storyline of the "Lavra" geographically - something connects them with the places where the future saint lived. Well, the third rope, firmly holding together the 15th century and the 21st century - as if things were seeping through some kind of wormhole (the poor plastic bottle in the forest was not said except by a mute and not written except by a handless one).
All these refinements and complexities are needed not only so that the modern reader can at least to some extent enjoy, albeit unusual, but a life cooked up, by the way, including from pieces of real-life texts that have been retold and very organically woven into the plot, but also in order to clearly present the main concept of the work.
There is no past, present and future, there are no pieces on the time scale signed with the name and measured from village to village, because there is no scale at all. The medieval man did not measure time, did not sign the date of the visit to the doctor in the calendar, did not mark the minutes, did not look at the clock out of boredom, and therefore the main "failure" of the heroes of the "Laurel" is the expectation of the end of the world, and hence the time, in 1492.
The Vodolazkin chronos is literally made up of separate, sometimes overlapping, overlapping times of the heroes of his works, because the whole can only be made up of many particulars, in this case, human lives and even individual events from them.
403.400 SRY