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The Forever-Reformation
Regenerating the heart and the art; or the perfect endlessness of the novelist Eugene Vodolazkin.
Has discussion of personal progress always been so much sturm und drang?
It clouds the digital air wherever two or more writers gather in its name, clotted with the terms consistency, subscribers, iterate, revenue, niche, and that so-wrongly-purloined-metaphor growth. Such words—invasive species from the fetid wetlands of digital marketing, mind you—obscure the nature and sensation of forward motion, I find. But the wish to advance also undergirds the dreams of my family, never more urgently or happily since the birth of our son. Dramatic thunderstorms terrorizing an open vista with light and fury can be beautiful and welcome. To progress in the heart and home is good; to weigh progress as a word upon the pen is uncertain, if not unsettling.
For what is perfection, to the Christian and the writer? We have the scriptural answer—“Sunday school answer,” for ye mockers—ready for the first: perfection in the Christian is total Christlikeness of heart and deed, to the glory of God. For the second, I propose that literary perfection is the fullest, most-unhindered meeting between the writer’s vision and the reader’s sensation. Both are impossibilities on purpose.
Reaching these perfections is a worthy objective, but there is an awaited dove still to land here: If I am to progress as a Christian and a writer, how should I understand progress?
Always the Pursuit
Progress will be a two-pronged word here because it is a two-part concept to the Christian who writes. Christian progress and aesthetic progress share a foundational adverb: always, as in the Christian must be sanctified always, as in the writer must improve always. Now, for those who hold fast to the anti-adverb rule I hear is so essential to good and serious writing, these two planes of progress share a noun: pursuit. The Christian pursues Christlikeness of heart and deed, and the writer pursues the skilled, total encounter by every word.
By either the adverb or the noun, you’ll find that progress here has an unending quality. Unless a writer preselects a far morning in early, mild summer to lay aside her pen and take up wholesome living through nightly card games or Walmart greetership, she will have to write for an undetermined length of time toward a destination she will never achieve, likely while never feeling the symmetry of completion. As the poet Paul Valéry wrote, “In the eyes of those who anxiously seek perfection, a work is never truly completed—a word that for them has no sense—but abandoned.” And unless the Christian somehow knows the hour of Christ’s return, she will need to live by the Spirit for an undetermined length of time, certain by her hope in, but rarely sensation of, the coming completion.
In the meantime, there is constant seeking to be done by both. The repetitions of the Kyrie Eleison hymn comes to mind: “Lord, have mercy,” the song asks in its simmering Greek. As a feature of the Catholic mass, the Kyrie Eleison is sung consistently but what it asks of God is the same. This simple but total plea encapsulates the foreverness of Christian repentance, of Christian need for the Lord. Yes, Christ has justified His people by His death and resurrection, but His Spirit’s sanctification process renders us dependent people undergoing infinitesimally slow transformations of the heart, so that to ask for God’s mercy is always true. In time and faith we may approach God by ever-smaller distances, but we are always still approaching.
The unfinished which edifies gleams with a certain Romantic glint: the polymath George Philippe Friedrich von Hardenberg—pen name “Novalis,” one of the early figures of German Romanticism—theorized a philosophy of endless philosophizing, specifically in tandem with his intellectual circle in Jena during the late 18th century. As one of his encyclopedic entries summarizes: “Rather than a finished or complete system of philosophy, Novalis advocates a continuous activity of ‘philosophizing’ (which he also sometimes called ‘Fichtesizing’) which gradually reveals the spiritual nature of the world.” The act and methods of poetry were his means of this revelation, and “Novalis emphasized the importance of the activity of seeking a ground for knowledge and experience over the ground itself.”
This seeking without end for a sure revelation is our vocation, the vocation behind the phrase ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda.
That phrase appeared first in a 1674 book of devotions by the Calvinist minister Jodocus van Lodenstein, and, then as now, it is evocative and instructive: “the church reformed, always reforming.”
But what, to van Lodenstein, is the process of reformation? What was the end of the church’s reform?
As W. Robert Godfrey analyzes this phrase in Ligonier, the reformation van Lodenstein described was not the external “adjustments and improvements to the church’s doctrine, worship, and government” begun in 1517 Wittenberg and reaching across the following decades to his own church. Godfrey writes that “for Calvinists like van Lodenstein, they had been definitively accomplished and settled.” These made up the ecclesia reformata, where “reform was a return to the teaching of the Bible.” My dear Catholic and Orthodox readers, lower your hackles and continue on, for this is an ecumenical essay at heart.
This return has its counterpart also in semper reformanda: the heart is the one always reforming, always returning to Christ its source of salvation and grace. “The great concern of ministers like van Lodenstein was not the externals of religion—as absolutely important as they are—but rather the internal side of religion,” Godfrey writes. “They all believed that once the externals of religion had been carefully and faithfully reformed according to the Word of God, the great need was for ministers to lead people in the true religion of the heart.”
Christ came not only to redeem the external behaviors of His people but to wholly reform the heart-source of those behaviors, as He says in Matthew 15 while rebuking the Pharisees’ external legalism with a prophecy from Isaiah: “These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; their teachings are merely human rules.”
van Lodenstein, as Godfrey recounts, was concerned with “regeneration” of the heart by the Spirit, which the Canons of Dort described with no small poetry in 1619:
“by the effective operation of the same regenerating Spirit, [God] also penetrates into the inmost being of man, opens the closed heart, softens the hard heart, and circumcises the heart that is uncircumcised. He infuses new qualities into the will, making the dead will alive, the evil one good, the unwilling one willing, and the stubborn one compliant; he activates and strengthens the will so that, like a good tree, it may be enabled to produce the fruits of good deeds.”
Notice the present tense of the verbs “opens,” “softens,” “infuses” and “strengthens”, together with the “good tree” metaphor adapted from New Testament teachings about the fruits of the Spirit: these are present, ongoing, and endless acts upon the heart. “The part of religion that always needs reforming is the human heart,” Godfrey writes, and that word always is central in its repetition. “It is vital religion and true faith that must be constantly cultivated.”
Perfectionism and Its Paradox
Even as the heart’s returning does not end, there remains perfection. The Christian, as is the writer, ought to be a perfectionist. What more should we want than total Christlikeness, than the total encounter within the reader’s mind?
However much we desire these perfections, each are unattainable. Christians have the promise of wholly-renewed and perfect living in eternity, but in the meantime there are no perfectly Christ-like members among us, though there are many saints. Likewise, though many beautiful novels, poems, and stories crowd the world of readers, there is no perfect text written by man. However much a text improves between one draft and the next, however exacting the revised words or structures become, the text remains always apart from the Edenic vision which the writer saw first. No alchemy of form, style, imagination, and transport has been written within a single text so that its meanings are transmitted without blemish to the reader’s ear, mind, and heart—never as the writer would wish.
Why, then, should we pursue perfection, when we will never reach it?
In an issue of Plough earlier this year, the writer
defined one answer in a strand of perfectionism that grows into inspiration: “perfectionism in the sense of ‘pursuing the impossible,’ whether that means some trait or achievement that is imaginable in theory but beyond our capacities — to love one’s neighbor as oneself; to love God with all one’s heart — or whether it means reconciling incompatible goods, cultivating necessary traits that are in tension with each other, as a parent must be both firm and forgiving, or as an ideal lover is both besotted and clear-eyed.”Such perfectionisms don’t necessarily defeat those who pursue it. Christman goes on, “The disciplined, methodical, sober pursuit of the impossible is what makes life interesting enough to go on with. It’s what good artists, teachers, janitors, gardeners, and friends do; it may eventually get us cold fusion.” Perfectionism for we the imperfect is tense with paradox: “Perfectionism in this sense is something we can’t really lay aside; we just seek a livable relationship to it.”
If I may lift this perfectionism whole from Christman’s review of The Impossible Art: Adventures in Opera by Matthew Aucoin, “the disciplined, methodical, sober pursuit of the impossible” is instructive to the heart and the art which are always being reformed. It summarizes well the task of the Christian and the writer, and while the adjectives that reform its central phrase certainly appeal to a Protestant ethic, that phrase—pursuit of the impossible—should inspire every Christian and writer.
How, then, could a writer regenerate his texts to pursue perfection?
He could, as many do, advance through iterations of style and so reform his voice on the page. The late Cormac McCarthy, for instance, demonstrated well this march from voice to voice as his novels coiled and condensed from the cloudier, maximalist Gothics of manic loners in eastern Tennessee to the minimalist blood-cherries of the violent Southwest. McCarthy’s Suttree, published in 1979, is a milder, stranger, and larger novel than his blood-drenched epic of western conquest Blood Meridian, published in 1985. Both are only distant relations to The Road (from 2009) or his cerebral swan-song sister-novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris, published last year. The late great’s reformations are notable for their totality, not just their skill. However, I’m not going to to analyze McCarthy here. The deluge of his well-deserved obituaries has soaked that ground deeply and richly, so that I can instead recommend the novel-by-novel reviews and analysis
has been writing for some time.For today, there is another writer has written, in circling exactitude, miniature reformations of style and form: Eugene Vodolazkin, author most recently of A History of the Island and among the best writers currently at work in the world.
Like many a novelist who doesn’t write in English, Vodolazkin has blinked into ubiquity for English-speaking readers when his Russian novels were translated in a cluster starting in 2012. I’ve read his debut, Solovyov and Larionov (translated by Lisa Hayden), am currently reading The Aviator (also translated by Hayden), and first heard of Vodolazkin courtesy of Laurus (his second novel but first translated into English). The chronology is roundabout for we English-language readers, but Vodolazkin’s regenerating progress through forms and content is unmistakable.
Naturally, the continuities in Vodolazkin best showcase where his fiction is endlessly changing. In the novels I have read for myself (and those I’ve read about in anticipation of reading for myself), his constant concern is Time perceived by History as populated by individuals. Vodolazkin in his formal education is a medievalist, and so History as his fiction’s centerpiece is unremarkable, but he extends beyond academic into philosophy to find Time, which he depicts as both fluid and constant, Time as History is recreated in the present.
Solovyov and Larionov, for instance, reconciles the two titular characters across the eight decades that separate them: Solovyov, the young Russian student of history, and Larionov, the enigmatic general of the Russian Civil War who was allowed to live a long postwar life despite bedeviling his Soviet enemies in battle. In the post-Soviet Russia of the 1990s, the student tracks the confounding life of the general from St. Petersburg to Yalta and back, piecing together what he can from the Larionov’s unfinished memoirs and the oral histories of those who had known him. Throughout, Vodolazkin intersperses Solovyov’s searching with recounted narratives of Larionov’s doomed exploits in the war but also with sprouts of the student’s own small history as a boy from Mile Marker 715, a spit of nowhere marked only by the trains which once passed through it. History, both documented and personal, is the means that Solovyov uses to search Time.
The Aviator, on the other hand, explores only the one titular character: Innokenty Petrovich Platonov—“Aviator Platonov” even before the reader is allowed his first name—who wakes up as an amnesiac in a Russian hospital in 1999. Coming unevenly back into his body, he writes diary entries that narrate his treatment but also record his returning memories, impressions of Anastasia his childhood love, of his revolutionary cousin, of his hellish imprisonment in a gulag. By these entries he realizes, with muted panic, that he has awoken in 1999 after being frozen in a cryogenic experiment in the 1920s. Platonov was “born with the century,” making him historically 99 years old, even as he is physically in his thirties. Memory is the means that Platonov uses to search Time, because he was personally cast from History.
While Time perceived remains the continuity between these novels, Vodolazkin has regenerated several features of the fiction between Soloyvov and The Aviator: foremost is the thematic shift I’d mentioned from history to memory, but also the shift from a third-person omniscient narration to a first-person diaristic narration. As they should, these forms of narration suit their respective concerns—third-person for the formal documentation of history, first-person for the returning personal memories. In the novels he has written since, I expect that Vodolazkin will cycle between familiar preoccupations, sister themes, and new forms in his endless pursuit of perfected fictions, all of which I look forward to reading.
Endless Recollecting to Mirror Endless Seeking
In its plot and structure, Solovyov and Larionov demonstrates the circling pursuit of its creator—a cycling approach to the perfection of historical understanding, by imperfect and unending means. The novel advances in Solovyov’s investigation of the General’s wartime survival for his doctoral dissertation, its path seemingly straight even with its free digressions into the pre-Soviet past and hilarious academic pettiness. Solovyov believes he will be able to explain why General Larionov survived once he recovers all portions of the man’s unpublished memoir and so travels first to the Crimean coastal city of Yalta, where Larionov lived at the end of his life.
There he meets Zoya, the daughter of the general’s last caretaker. Herself a keeper of small histories as the curator of Yalta’s Chekhov museum, Zoya leads Solovyov a few bounds closer to his object (while also bringing him into her bed and teaching him to swim in the sea, themselves touching companion acts). What Solovyov can’t learn from Zoya’s mother the caretaker Zoya helps him find in a manuscript fragment hidden in the Yusupov Palace, which they steal in a heist too breathless for the scant findings it gives Solovyov.
In Zoya, Volodazkin embodies the novel’s imperfect mechanism of History: she is the first of an ensemble whose members give Solovyov bits of knowledge, so that he approaches the understanding he seeks but only incrementally. Zoya, in time, passes from the historian’s heart and the narrative. Solovyov must return to St. Petersburg to continue his search, which quite surprisingly leads him through his own childhood memories and back to his childhood love, Liza. Her last name—Larionova, a clue Solovyov had long overlooked—sends him looking for her as a possible granddaughter of Larionov, but he can only write puzzled letters to the the universities Liza might have attended after they’d separated.
But Liza’s last name, Solovyov finds, is ultimately a red herring. She is not the General’s granddaughter, though the flourish of romantic fate that might’ve made it so had intoxicated Solovyov. He is again directionless in his investigation, now spinning in concentric circles of unhelpful size. But then a full envelope arrives—from Liza, from the last university where he inquired about her—and the envelope contains a small portion of the General’s memoir.
The portion, though a relief, does not complete the pages Solovyov has already collected. It does not explain Larionov’s survival.
As her surname did, the portion that Liza shares seems to mislead Solovyov. Doesn’t perfection require completion, for his historian’s work? Not necessarily, at least in the way Vodolazkin dramatizes the partial understanding of History. Solovyov never completes the General’s memoirs to satisfy himself nor his dissertation. His searching ends in the partial and the undefined, which Vodolazkin implies is enough.
To be sure, an eccentric older scholar in Solovyov’s department gives him a laser-accurate reference to a dusty collection of folklore containing a folktale that alludes to the circumstances of General Larionov: two warring generals mistakenly cross paths in the same train station. The general of the smaller force, capitalizing on his good fortune, crosses the platform with his bodyguards and overpowers the other general to take him hostage. But he does not put his foe to death though it is within his power. Instead, the general releases his opponent in mercy that his opponent had never once shown in battle.
Solovyov thrums with recognition on reading this folktale—could it be the explanation for Larionov’s survival? Was Larionov’s life preserved in return for the life he had once given back? Solovyov even finds that the source of the folktale was likely one of the General’s personal attendants, a man who would have witnessed the event. But the story was later classified as only Russian folklore, rather than historical record. It is, by that unverifiable classification, inadmissible in the courts of History. And so Solovyov’s understanding of Larionov remains incomplete, and even though the novel delves into the general’s wartime experiences, they also don’t answer the chief question posed of his life.
Why would a novel of History satisfy itself with incomplete histories? Rather than completion, Soloyvov and Larionov is a novel of recollecting, not recollection. Its cycling motion of recollecting bits and then retelling them, its progress of infinitesimal reconstruction, is its focal point. Like History itself, that motion will not end. And, after Vodolazkin followed this novel with The Aviator, and then the medieval Laurus, and then the musician’s Brisbane, and then the out-of-recorded-chronology A History of the Island, his progress as a novelist through his subjects and his theme will not end either.
Would we want his writing to end such progress? End doesn’t necessarily mean retirement but settling, sitting rather than seeking. Like his debut novel did, Vodolazkin has perfected progress that will never have completion nor symmetry.
Reformed, Regenerate
His skills as a novelist grow most fruitfully from that tense outcrop of perfected imperfection, which I find an aspiration not only as a writer but also a believer. The Christ I follow is one who simply asks for constant approaches of the heart. Like perfect fiction, His is an impossible task to which I give everything.
Perfection in the Christian walk and on the page is incremental motion without a destination. The former is God’s work by the Spirit who first descended in tongues of fire, and the latter is our work by daring paradox, by dogged insistence on writing down the eternal search for perfected fiction.
Thanks for being here, y’all. May you progress to perfection and not fear the word.
Thanks for the shoutout! And also for the recommendation. I hadn't heard of Vodolazkin, will definitely add him to my list! Normally I don't find plot premises of "[character] digs deep into the past and learns about x character" to be a clincher, just because a lot of novels, especially in translation, have a premise of that sort. In fact, come to think of it I wonder if there's a conspiracy against the historical novel? But it sounds like this novel is healthily sophisticated in the good sense.
Thanks, Kevin. Similar preoccupations synchronising: https://scriptourer.substack.com/p/incompleteness