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vita è un mosaico di tanti frammenti”

E allinsegna del “viaggio” questo magnifico romanzo articolato in quattro libri che corrispondono ad altrettante tappe del tortuoso percorso spirituale ed umano di Arsenio/Ustino/Ambrogio/Lauro, un uomo buono che nella Russia della seconda metà delassume diversi nomi, destini, affetti, conoscenze, in una parola diverse vite.


Un viaggio che, nellaccezione più evidente, è un itinerario attraverso i luoghi del mondo conosciuto, descritti con lerudizione e la dovizia di dettagli di un romanzo storico, che trova il suo apogeo nel libro terzo Il libro del cammino, dalla natìa Russia europea allItalia alla Terra Santa e ritorno.


Parimenti fra le pagine si svolge un viaggio nel tempo, non solo grazie al talento dellautore nel rievocare con sorprendente efficacia lo spessore storico, mistico, culturale del XV secolo, ma soprattutto per la presenza di personaggi in grado di predire avvenimenti del futuro, un futuro prossimo ma anche remoto e a noi contemporaneo, ed altri che studiano e documentano eventi del passato.
Anche nelle meditazioni del protagonista il concetto di tempo è al centro di innumerevoli riflessioni, talora contraddittorie: mi è chiaro che gli eventi non si verificano sempre nel tempo.
A volte accadono di per sè, come sfilati dal tempo Da tanto pensava che il tempo fosse discontinuo e che i suoi spezzoni non fossero collegati tra loroil tempo non si muove più in avanti, ma in cerchio, perché in cerchio

procedono i fatti che lo riempionoCome appassionato di geometria mi piace paragonare il moto del tempo a una spirale.
E una ripetizione ma a un livello nuovo, Più alto.

A sua volta, il percorso etico e spirituale di Arsenio è colto in un movimento che è continuo, ma orientato costantemente alla dedizione al prossimo, alla bontà danimo, allintensa partecipazione alle disgrazie altrui, trasformando lindividuo studioso delle tradizioni medicinali, erboristiche, pranoterapeutiche della fase giovanile in un guaritore, la cui fama determina preghiere e pellegrinaggi per gli interventi che non di rado rivestono un carattere miracoloso e soprannaturale, e quindi in un monaco e poi in un santo.


Né si può dimenticare il viaggio tutto interiore al protagonista, indelebilmente segnato dalla perdita dellamata Ustina che tuttavia lo accompagna ovunque nello spirito e che egli interpella di continuo come una presenza permanente nellanima rappresentando, in un certo senso, il motore stesso del movimento incessante verso una meta che appare irraggiungibile.


In questo labirinto di viaggi, temi e storie che si intrecciano spiccano immagini di grande potenza suggestiva, ricche di misticismo e profonda religiosità, ma anche di elementi soprannaturali, come il volto rugoso del vecchio che il piccolo Arsenio intravede osservarlo fra le fiamme del focolare, uno specchio in cui il vecchio Lauro, decenni più tardi alla fine della vita, rivedrà le sembianze del bambino in procinto di intraprendere il percorso esistenziale.


Finora la lettura migliore dellanno,
Avanti tutta: ancora un russo contemporaneo, ancora una lettura dastelle e mezza, e sempre col dubbio se non sarebbe il caso di arrivare a cinque.


Tanto il singolo titolo quanto l'autore mi erano perfettamente ignoti fino a venti giorni fa, fino al momento in cui l'algoritmo di GR mi ha ficcato sotto il naso una bella copertina in cui una "L", stilizzata e ricamata alla maniera delle miniature medioevali, va a formare il muso di un lupo.
Acquistato immediatamente, e grazie alla copertina dell'edizione italiana ho imparato a conoscere anche Tyukanov, E questo è solo l'inizio della storia, e non avevo nemmeno iniziato a leggerlo, Questo libro è tutto così, un oscillare vertiginoso tra estremi che finiscono incomprensibilmente per includersi l'uno nell'altro: è una perla ma è anche una miniera è una fiaba ma è anche un testo rigorosamente storico è antico ma anche moderno è ligio alla religione ma è anche strafottente nei confronti del fanatismo religioso è poetico ma è anche realistico e obiettivo nelle descrizioni.


E dire che all'inizio della lettura, per un momento mi era parso alquanto pacchiano, e di certo non ci trovavo nulla per cui gridare al capolavoro o alla scoperta dell'autentica perla.
Nel primo capitolo alcuni passaggi mi sapevano vagamente di maschilismo veterotestamentario, un saporaccio davvero cattivo, Però mi sono portata avanti di buon grado perché nella scrittura si percepiva chiaramente la mano dello storico: mi pareva di ritrovare un po' del Vassalli di Marco e Mattio, e mi pareva di ritrovare molto anche di Eco, sebbene si andasse in direzioni diversissime sia da Baudolino che da Il nome della rosa.
Questa curiosità storica o forse curiosità per lo storico è stata il motore che mi ha sostenuta nel momento di minor convincimento, ed è stato un bene, perché infine ho potuto scoprire un lavoro che quanto a erudizione non ha nulla da invidiare a Eco, e per soprammercato riesce a centrare la perfetta metà via tra i due sopracitati Baudolino e Il Nome della Rosa.


Tema principale del romanzo è la circolarità e la relatività del tempo: tempo inteso sia come tempo di una vita, ma anche come tempo storico fatto di secoli.
Ed è un tema che offre infiniti risvolti: storici, religiosi, filosofici, filologici, scientifici e chissà quanti altri ancora, Tutti perfettamente riassunti, condensati ed esposti con facilità,

Le eventuali e temporanee perplessità possono nascere dal fatto che il libro non è per niente semplice da catalogare e riassumere, anzi è quasi impossibile, è un vero oggettononidentificato.
Questo grazie al fatto che non è banale e scusate se è poco, Riesce a non essere banale pur usando schemi fiabeschi, pur avendo un'ambientazione enormemente abusata quale è quella medioevale, pur sfruttando il tema del viaggio altro elemento usato e strausato e pur avendo per protagonista uno che non è solo un santone ma un autentico Santo, e si sa che i santi sono noiosi.
E non entro nemmeno nei dettagli della trama perché finirebbe per sembrare ancor più una banalità, Qualunque sia il pregiudizio o la premonizione o l'impressione che uno si è formato alle prime pagine, la vedrà scardinarsi rapidamente di mano in mano che si avvicina al finale, e questo è certamente uno dei migliori obiettivi raggiungibili per un ottimo romanzo.


Come per la Stepnova una decina di giorni fa, anche oggi per Vodolazkin mi meraviglio e rammarico che il romanzo sia così poco diffuso.
Questo è un gioiellino meritevole di ben maggiore popolarità, This book was not what I expected and my expectations of its quality were high, So when I began to travel along with the pilgrim, Arseny, I was initially left scratching my head at all the seemingly strange events that did not seem to be building toward anything.
But then I read this quote from the author, Vodolazkin: "There are two ways to write about modernity: the first is by writing about the things we have the second, by writing about those things we no longer have.
" "Laurus" is a book about the things we no longer have, A world infused with God, where living in the mystery brings purpose rather than mere confusion, and a life of love that is sorrowful yet always rejoicing.
To inhabit the world of "Laurus" and feel a pang of longing for something of the beauty and mystery in our modern place is to have read this book well.
This is a surprising, deep and mystical novel set largely in medieval Russia but branching out to different places and sometimes different times, We know that Arseny was born inand was brought up by his grandfather, Christofer, When his grandfather dies, Arseny becomes the local healer and, one day, brings into his humble home a young woman Ustina, When she dies in childbirth, he begins a life travelling and trying to make atonement for her death,

You will have to decide whether Arseny, who is known by several names throughout the novel, is a Saint or Holy Fool.
He is revered by some, beaten by others, as he heads out across Europe and even to the Middle East, on pilgrimage, The author manages to recreate a feel for the medieval period which, although it includes visions of future times weaved in seamlessly, is a time of pestilence and plague.
It is also a time when religion is all pervasive and Laurus is a man untouched by the disease around him protected and strangely innocent.


This is a very immersive read and it felt almost strange at times to emerge into the present when you feel yourself so much in the past.
A very intriguing novel, which has much to offer both the individual reader and book groups,
Un roman incredibil despre timp, despre vindecare și despre mântuire prin iubire, scris întrun sublim registru tarkovskian,
După părerea mea, meritul cel mai important al acestei cărţi este că reuşeşte să se facă dezirabilă și digerabilă atât pentru evlavioşi cât şi pentru libercugetători, fiind lipsită de orice aroganță excesiv moralizatoare.

Spun că este o carte despre timp, deoarece arată cum şi de ce anume nu există timp fizic, ci doar veşnicia.
Pentru Creator nu este nimeni mort, însă doar planul existenţei fizice este cel în care putem acţiona și putem evolua,
Spun că este o carte despre vindecare, fiindcă arată cum procesul vindecării nu se epuizează în tămăduirea trupească, nici nu se reduce la despovărarea sufletului de păcate, dar spune și de unde anume vine eliberarea completă.

Şi în fine, este o carte despre mântuire prin iubire, fiindcă Arseni împlineşte, în trista şi chinuita lui existenţa pământească, exact sintagma ce face diferenţa între Legea Veche, a lui Moise şi Legea Nouă, a lui Iisus Hristos: "Poruncă nouă vă dau vouă: iubiţivă unii pe alţii aşa cum vam iubit Eu.
".
Adulat sau repudiat, Arseni știe ca este singurul responsabil pentru toate relele ce i se întâmplă în viață, dar nu încetează să îi iubească și să îi aline pe toți, buni și răi, cucernici sau păcătoși, sperând iertare pentru sine și mântuire pentru Ustina, de a cărei moarte se învinuiește până la sfârșitul zilelor.

În glorie sau în mizerie, amărât sau fericit, slujește până la sacrificiul suprem aproapele, apoi părăsește lumea în oprobriul public, dar împăcat cu sine și îndumnezeit pe deplin.

Superlativul apoteozei creștine, nui așa,

Една от чудесните книги на.
Закъснелият отзив може да се намери на познатото място: sitelink тук .
A book in a genre I've hardly read since my age hit double figures: stories of the saints, Laurus, the life of a fictional fifteenthcentury Russian folk healer, holy fool, pilgrim and eventual monk is essentially an invented example, Baptised Arseny, the protagonist adopts a number of names through different phases of his life, culminating in 'Laurus', Miracles and prophetic visions are presented as a matter of course, as in the life of a saint, not the mode of fantasy or magic realism familiar to nonreligious English speaking readers.
It's strangely fresh if, that is, literal hagiographies are something you haven't encountered for a long time and if they do not exasperate you.
Unlike a traditional saint's life written for the faithful, the narrative doesn't refer to God as an active force, though characters' religious beliefs are certainly part of the story.
It's a clever approach that makes it possible for the book to appeal to believers and to atheists, Or at least to atheists with a touch of sympathy for mysticism this book may frustrate readers with a strict preference for realist fiction, those who are perenially infuriated by the religious or who like their fictional magical systems to come with clear rules.
Those who grew up reading religious stories may see, as I did, that this is a familiar 'magical system', but from a time before we had read about most of the other ones in fiction.
Unspoken mystery, more than logic or rules, is its governing principle,

Laurus is also an intoxicatingly atmospheric work of historical fiction, Late medieval plague folk religion/magic are home territory for me as history topics in Western Europe, particularly England, that is, Russia is less familiar, though I know a little, a fair bit of it from W, F. Ryan's sitelinkThe Bathhouse at Midnight, It's been a while since I looked at the Ryan, but I'd still highly recommend it, Everything in Laurus that was not intended as deliberate anachronism and evocation of the slipperiness of time like plastic bottles among the debris of a spring thaw rang resoundingly true of the era.
I acquired a strong sense of trust in the narrative and the research behind it the author is an academic specialising in medieval Russian literature yet I still craved to know the accuracy of local details.
e. g. Did people use that herb for that Is that exactly how stoves were But not knowing for sure about these bits and pieces, being unable to nitpick as I might have with an equivalent novel about an English cunningman, meant that I could get more fully lost in the story qua story.
And with mysticism, that feeling of immersion is definitely part of the objective, The strength of religious and magical beliefs in Laurus are such that it feels like a more powerful evocation of the medieval worldview than is most historical fiction, which decentres religion to fit contemporary preferences.
Not that a CthCst century person ever fully know typical ways of thinking from hundreds of years before they were born,

The untranslated original of Laurus interpolates occasional phrases of medieval Russian with a bulk of more "timeless" to us narrative, and the odd deliberately contemporary word.
The translation renders the medieval forms into English via the readable means of extra 'e's on the end of some words and some 'y's instead of 'i', although a handful of archaic vocabulary is also used, including the adorable 'flittermouse'.
I'd have liked to see something bolder done with these olde worlde fragments: phrases or adaptations from Langland and Chaucer perhaps, Although they were several decades too early for the novel's setting, Chaucer would be beautifully appropriate for the pilgrimage episode, However, it's not as if I know The Canterbury Tales well enough to swear that there's no phrase of it lurking in Laurus.
It's understandable that the publishers would play it relatively safe with the language, despite recent acclaim for Paul Kingsnorth's sitelinkThe Wake and its codOld English the audience for new translated fiction is not huge and difficult wordforms may put off a few more readers.
One editing choice that did seem odd, though, was to keep several Polish place names in transliterated Russian whilst other towns were given their general, local or English names correct for the time.
I was glad a map is included more novels should have them but what was really needed was not the map of Europe and the Near East, which readers with decent general knowledge will know anyway but one showing the Russian towns and villages Arseny travelled around.


Skimming some blogs about Laurus and Vodolazkin, not long after starting the book, I noticed the author had wanted to write about 'a good man', in deliberate contrast to the darker or ambiguous lead characters in many contemporary novels.

This particular type of moral approach these days is uncommon in Western literary fiction, If the Anglo lit world has a dominant moral paradigm at the moment, it's about the representation of diversity and especially feminism the other significant strand being aesthetic or hedonistic, not much different from Wilde's stance over a hundred years earlier, that books are not morally good or bad, they are well or poorly written.
A novel by a white male author about a white male lead character inevitably has limited traction with the type of readers who select books primarily by diversity criteria.


Arseny's journey and good works are essentially, from the modern perspective, about atoning for an abusive relationship in his teens, his girlfriend Ustina was, to his great sorrow, buried in unconsecrated ground and possibly actually died as a result of his possessive and controlling behaviour towards her in life: it's a canny acknowledgement of current standards that sits rather well in a medieval context without using the tired historical fiction trope of "the only modern man".
I wasn't entirely convinced about Arseny not marrying Ustina, given that he grew up steeped in religion, a world where human children come to life only at christening if death occurs before that day, it lasts for all eternity, but as the book wore on, this creaky hinge felt increasingly irrelevant in such a large story.
Whilst the abuse is acknowledged, in a fascinating fusion of contemporary values with historical context By destroying Ustina, I deprived her of the possibility of discovering what You placed within her, of developing that, and compelling a Divine light to shine.
, the book concentrates on Arseny's story, and one can imagine some readers might label the novel 'pages of manpain', From the current popular feminist perspective, Arseny's lifelong devotion to Ustina's memory which Western medieval Christianity might have considered heretical, and its role as the cause of good works, is going to be ambiguous.
I think it's best seen in a medieval literary context: Ustina is to Arseny what Beatrice and Laura were to Dante and Petrarch, These days, norms are very different: we meet, and see images of, so many more appealing people than a medieval person would have, and for most, after a few years even the strongest lost love fades and no longer seems quite the centre of life it once did.
I also thought it was excellent that Vodolazkin how, showed during the relationship, total absorption in a partner, when one feels otherwise completely alone in the world, is not necessarily the beautiful thing old poetry might imply.
If it's present, there's probably also a gnawing fear of loss, and even if there is no violence, these attempts at fusion with another independent creature can easily end up unethical and hurtful rather than lovely.
I'm not sure I've read any fiction better in understanding why someone might feel like this, of its wondrousness when it is brand new, and of how it can go on to cause a horrible mess.


The shape of time is perhaps the most metaphysical theme of Laurus, Theoretical philosophising over the nature of time doesn't really engage me I tend to take what I need from other disciplines and find philosophy superfluous: In history, I am satisfied with linear time.
In psychology I see how time may feel as if it exists in parallel when memories are sparked by something in the present, or as if it is circular when one finds situations recurring with remarkable similarity but metaphor is fine too, phrased with "is", rather than "as if", emphasising the realness of those feelings in the immediate moment.
Not just about one's own life but about places:years ago, this was forest feeling what it might be like if one's chair were surrounded by trees, on soft ground, the air colder.
Inyears time, this place might be under shallow water, and other areas I know might be covered in dense housing for millions more people.
I think about this anywhere I spend much time but characters in this book actually get, sometimes, to see, I find this wonderful, as some readers of superhero comics love the powers in those, The amount of information we can now find is vast, but how exhilarating to be able to see more, beyond the horizon.
Most curious in Laurus are the visions of what, as far as I can tell, are ordinary Russians of the twentieth century and snippets of their lives.
On one hand, I wanted to hear what fifteenth century men made of these moderns' outfits, gadgets and social roles, but that would have deviated from the nonjudgemental yet almost holy tone of the narrative, which I loved, and which may also be the only way to carry out such a frequency of miracles under the nose of the presentday, predominantly rationalist reader.


Bringing together religion, the struggles of daily life, and attempts to determine the future, eschatology is presented as a worthy area of enquiry among the characters as indeed it was at the time.
And, perceptively, Vodolazkin shows how it was an absolutely understandable mass response at a time when most lives were filled with uncertainty, distress and upheaval.
The palpable relief of everything being out of one's hands, and going to end soon, is presented overtly in Laurus, with greater empathy for the people than I remember textbooks having.
Millenarianism was one of the few areas in which historians of a couple of decades ago still appeared to look down on people of the past.


Whilst my knowledge of contemporary Russia is sketchier than my awareness of its history it comes mostly from a few documentaries and one recent popular nonfiction booksitelinkNothing Is True and Everything is Possible by Peter Pomerantsev, I feel that Laurus is one of those novels reflective of its time and place of writing: of the recent popular resurgence of mysticism and folk traditions in Russia, the latter partly as a facet of Russian nationalism.
Laurus is carefully positioned in emphasising the spiritual and aesthetic components of this tendency to celebrate the country's cultural distinctiveness, without being overtly political in a way that may alienate the hawkish or the liberal.
Pilgrims are attacked whilst travelling abroad but on one occasion it is by other Russians, The central character helps and stands up for the unfortunate, but none of those whom we hear of individually is from a group that would be controversial for the Russian right gay people or Muslims, for example.
Yet there is space for the liberal to infer that he would help those people, because that's what his brand of goodness means from that position, especially if we grew up with the sort of liberal Christianity that frequently asserted Jesus would.
Arseny's origins near Belozersk, one of the fabled five original cities of medieval Russia a sitelinkmuch smaller country than it is not, cement the idea of the protagonist as a personification of essential Russian tradition.


My early feeling that the novel had something to do with the country's sense of itself was confirmed by the closing lines, from a conversation including a Danzig merchant:

You have already been in our country for a year and eight months, answers blacksmith Averky, but have not understood a thing about it.

And do you yourselves understand it asks Zygfryd,
Do we The blacksmith mulls that over, and looks at Zygfryd, Of course we, too, do not understand,

Read amp reviewed Decemberedited June,