A Hagiographic Hero in a Novelistic Narrative: Laurus by Eugene Vodolazkin (Part One)

Abstract

As genres, the hagiography and the novel are close in their intention to show the path of a personality and to depict the whole life of a hero. However, the value orientations of a novelistic hero and a hagiographic hero are opposite: from the very beginning, the latter denies what the former is striving for — the success in worldly life. The main hero of E. G. Vodolazkin’s novel Laurus, from his very birth, has the inclinations of the hagiographic hero, but at the beginning of his independent life, he behaves not in the hagiographic, but in the novelistic way, which leads him to tragedy: his beloved woman dies without the repentance and ritual that are important in terms of hagiography. The article examines how the hero, trying to save the soul of his beloved woman, turns his life into a constant feat of serving people. On this path he reconsiders the meaning of life’s goals on a general and individual level, the categories of time and how time is filled with events, and the horizontal (“worldly life”) and vertical (“a life leading to Heaven”) paths. The hero goes through four distinct life periods and, accordingly, changes his name four times, but a certain monad of his personality remains unchanged. Growing in holiness, the hero saves the life of a young woman — he assists her when she delivers her baby — and that compensates for the loss of his beloved one and their unborn son. Since after the hero's death his unburied body does not decay and eventually disappears, it can be assumed that the hero achieves the goal of his life — the salvation of his beloved woman's soul, as well as his own. The ­method of analytical reading allows us to trace how the author in his narration overcomes the ­antinomy of the novelistic and hagiographic principles, and how those principles influence each other and grow into each other.