Yevgeny Vodolazkin: "In Russia there are many who express their opinion against the war"

The writer Evgueni Vodolazkin, born in Kiev in 1964 within the Russian community residing in Ukraine, says that he learned of the attack by Putin's troops like everyone else, when he opened the internet on February 24.

He lives in St. Petersburg, but the news caught him in Granada in full promotion tour of his powerful novel

, which has also taken him to Madrid and Malaga.

Ten years have passed since he published this work in Russian, and the recent translation into Spanish could not have come at a more delicate time.

"I am categorically against the war and I demand that it be stopped," he stated in a tweet (already deleted) written through the profile of the Armaenia publishing house, which publishes his book.

“In Russia there are many who express their opinion against the war.

The main task now is to stop the war activities immediately and come to the negotiating table, taking into account the full complexity of the problem and the large number of parties involved: from the local population to the superpowers”, he opined.

"I think that Ukraine will continue to be an independent state," the author who has won important prizes in his country explained to EL PAÍS,

The current world seems not so far from the one that surrounds the protagonist of

.

Arsenij is an orphan who learns from his grandfather the use of medicinal herbs and natural remedies in plague-ridden late fifteenth-century Russia.

Translated into twenty languages, Vodolazkin says that he believed that no one, except his wife, was going to read it.

“In Russia there are 700,000 people who position themselves as writers.

It is a literature-centric country.

But there are not so many people who read.

I have been lucky because people do read me”, he said last Thursday during a meeting with Antonio Muñoz Molina, who read a fragment of the work in Granada.

The author was surprised.

"I loved the musicality of this translation, the incredible melody of the Spanish language," said the Russian.

The translation is by Rafael Guzmán, and in the prologue he states that

's is a story written in a “low voice”.

If there was a narrator, I would whisper.

“The constant screaming exhausts, tires.

You can pay attention to them only for a short time.

The human being says the most important things in a calm state,” confirmed Vodolazkin.

He is convinced that the novel is the most perfect form of literature, and

is written in the form of hagiography.

The main character travels through confined towns, with the smell of death and houses with closed doors.

He goes through a world of pain and sacrifice that coexists with ice and poverty.

And where the healer emerges as a beacon of hope with his unique abilities.

The protagonist's fame expands beyond Russia, which leads the healer to make a pilgrimage through Greece, Croatia, Italy or Israel until he undertakes a return home and ends his days as a hermit.

The plot deals with faith, the relationship with God, love and eternity, and follows the footsteps of a person with a good heart.

“A positive protagonist is a headache for literature.

It is unconvincing, while the scoundrels are very easily described.

Evil often has its charm”, said Vodolazkin, who believes that modern heroes are even less credible (“except Dostoevsky's”) and, for this reason, he has traveled to the fifteenth century to find his.

The writer has spent more than three decades studying the Middle Ages in the department of Ancient Russian Literature of the Pushkin House, and uses some diachronic variations of the Russian language in the work.

He insists that there are similarities between that world and today's.

That plague and our pandemic is the clearest example.

But he underlines the differences.

“For the first time the world has been closed to lock and key.

It is an unprecedented event.

And there are few events in history that can be said to have taken place for the first time,” he says.

He emphasizes that the Middle Ages is surrounded by myths and that the human being could have learned from that time "a deeper attitude towards oneself and towards the world".

In his opinion, that stage became a symbol of ignorance and cruelty.

And yet

Arsenij's character seeks redemption as he saves the lives of other human beings, talks to his deceased lover, and does good in a medieval world, but he comes across as very contemporary.

“The writer (and the reader) is interested above all in what is current.

And he looks at history as a mirror in which he sees his problems, ”says Vodolazkin.

He adds arguments.

He believes that Russian literature is currently very close to Western literature because it shares its laws, but offers themes "exotic enough" to be interesting.

In addition to Lauris, Vodolazkin has other works published in Spain such as

and

, both published by Rubiños-1860.

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