Roughly halfway through Eugene Vodolazkin’s A History of the Island, there is a confrontation between two kinds of history. The fictional Island’s monastic chronicler, Ilary, becomes a professor at a newly opened university. He does so in the face of bewilderment from his faculty colleagues, though, who look upon his historical work as unscientific, irreconcilable with modernity, and expressed in antediluvian language. At a meeting of the Island Historical Society, Ilary is faced with a choice to either rewrite the history “in accordance with contemporary scientific information and the overall course of progress”, or else remain “an obscurant” in the…