In Search of True History

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 eyes of the guild historians.

The latter path is the one Ilary chooses. The novel’s narrative voice does shift subtly as the monks pass on the historical task to their brothers. Yet the type of history remains the same. “What is history?” ask the professors. Ilary answers that history is “a description of the struggle of Good and Evil, a struggle led by human hands”. Vodolazkin’s fictional historian Ilary, indeed all of the chroniclers and narrators of A History of the Island, reject the modern notion that history is an “uninterrupted chain of causes and effects”. History is a process that is overseen by, and guided by, divine providence and, as such, it is imbued with meaning, purpose and unity.

Vodolazkin is a Ukraine-born, Russian-based novelist and specialist in medieval literature, history and folklore. Previous novels wrestle with similar themes to A History, with time and history at the centre of the central characters’ unusual perspectives and actions in the world. These include the 2012 masterpiece Laurus, which depicts the holy man Arseny’s sojourn in medieval Russia and beyond, a sojourn that stretches well beyond the normal span of a human life. The Aviator also sees not so much extraordinary long life, but time travel for Innokenty.

Vodolazkin employs a similar magical realism in the main characters in A History. The book is about an island, primarily, but the inhabitants who occupy centre stage are Parfeny and Ksenia, a royal couple who are thirty-five decades old. This extraordinary fact is not interrogated by any other characters or narrators in A History, which is similar to the treatment of Laurus’s Arseny, who inexplicably lives in the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries. The miracle, the magic, of these lives ungirds the remarkable role that the characters play. In both Laurus and A History, the extraordinarily venerable are also extraordinarily spiritual and self-sacrificing.

History and time in A History are also complicated by a prophecy from a certain Agafon, whose veiled prediction points to the crucial role Parfeny and Ksenia will play in the fate of the Island. The couple, who become the Island’s rulers and unite the claims of two families to the throne through their marriage, are co-narrators with the historian-monks. They provide commentary, their own personal recollections of events, and then a second narrative about a film production of their lives.

It is, as you are no doubt thinking, all very odd. It is all very gripping and profound, too. The history of the Island moves through medieval kingships and princedoms, imperial conquest and subjection, a return to Parfeny and Ksenia’s rule after the empire leaves, numerous civil conflicts, and then a radical political revolution that casts its long shadow over the remains of the Island’s history through modernity. The constants are the monks who chronicle the history, and Parfeny and Ksenia who come and go as the Island’s monarchs.

It feels to the reader that there is no time when the royal couple are absent from the Island, even when they have been forced out or pushed to the political periphery. Over and over, in times of crisis, the medieval monarchs return. They never force their way into power; they merely arrive when needed. The nagging sense is that they are always necessary, that the divine-right rule of the virtuous is constitutionally inevitable. The book serves as a reminder of the medievalist Francis Oakley’s observation that modern democratic and republican ideals are, in the end, a small island in a huge river of divine kingship.

Vodolazkin’s magical realism, wherein he plays with time and supra-human lifespans, emerges in the monastic narrator’s recounting of important events. Omens figured by the strange activity of animals (a talking cat, for example), a natural disaster, and even a cosmic disaster, are all recounted without the modern sensibility for explaining every­thing scientifically. “Were comets thought to be dragons in the Middle Ages?” asks the (modern) publisher Phillip. Parfeny replies:

“I cannot deny the obvious.”

“And now?”

“And now a dragon is taken for a comet.”

These comparisons between the medieval mind, which embraces the supernatural and mysterious, and the modern mind are mirrored in the novel’s explorations of history. The Cambridge historian Herbert Butterfield, in his 1949 lectures on Christianity and history, recounted a viva voce examination where the candidate “ascribed everything to the direct interposition of the Almighty and therefore felt himself excused from the discussion of any intermediate agencies”. Butterfield’s point was not to completely belittle this perspective. Rather, he was drawing attention to the tensions between a providentialist history and modern technical history.

Indeed, Butterfield, a devout Christian, felt this tension acutely. On the one hand he would say that “as a technical historian … I should not be satisfied with the answer that Christianity triumphed merely because it was true and right, or merely because God decreed its victory.” And rightly so. The historian’s job is not to fall back on the mystery of providence, but it is to explain how things played out, and what human, material and political forces guide our understanding of occurrences and events. Academic history, from Ranke onwards, was not designed to offer an overarching meaning to these events.

Tightly argued philosophies of historiography, like that of Michael Oakeshott, support this conclusion. To attempt a kind of reverse prophecy, to speak divine meaning into the events of the past, is laden with methodological trouble for the disciplined historian. But as Butterfield challenges us to reconsider in the latter part of his lectures, history often, in hindsight, offers patterns and meanings to the historian. The trouble might lie in the modern mind’s unwillingness to recognise these.

The reader of Vodolazkin’s novel is confronted by this tension immediately. “Long ago,” writes the chronicler, “we had no history.” Events came and went, cycles of seasons, human lives, tragedies and natural disasters all occurred, but the Island’s inhabitants did not recall or order these scientifically. With Christianity came the written word, but also Christianity revealed “that human history has a beginning and is hastening toward its end”. In contrast to a common historical teleology, the movement of history is not equivalent to progress. According to Brother Ilary, “history’s primary event was the incarnation of Christ”. This fact means that history “is now the universal history of moving away from Christ”. It is a regress away from this most holy, weighty and significant event.

This focus on the incarnation as the crux of history resembles Eastern Orthodox theology with its emphasis on the Word becoming flesh. But the Latin West also considered the incarnation of Christ a central historical event. Augustine of Hippo wrote early in the fifth century in City of God that the coming of Christ was the central event in history. The difference is that Augustine’s post-Christ epoch, which we are living in now, is not one of regress from Christ. Rather it is one of indifference. Augustine’s saeculum, “this present age”, is an epoch of waiting.

God is not doing anything significant in this age, in Augustine’s view, apart from gathering his people to himself through the work of the church. Even if he were to carry out significant tasks, mere humans could not comprehend them. We cannot do “sacred history” in the saeculum. Given this, perhaps the Augustinian view of post-Christ history is the birthplace of the modern view of history that Vodolazkin confronts in A History of the Island. For the monastic chroniclers, all history is sacred, because the entirety is related in some way to redemption and the cosmic battle between good and evil.

This peculiar historical mindset is explained in the novel by the medieval, theological view of history that the monks of A History embody in their chronicle. “God was at the centre of the world during the Middle Ages but the individual is now at the centre of the world.” This means that the historical viewpoint “during the Middle Ages is from above”, a view that “reflects the sole God, hence it is also the only view”. The modern world places the individual at the centre and therefore there are many views of history.

This reversion to multiple perspectives is not a bad thing, in moderation. Stories that might otherwise be lost in the sands of time are captured for posterity by the exercise of modern history. The life and opinion of the gold miner in the Victorian goldfields is almost certainly not of world-historical significance. And yet the miner is a person whose life is reflective, for better or worse, of the human condition we all share. The modern individualist history, which is an outworking of the “guild history” we see in the modern discipline, cultivates this generosity of spirit towards the obscure.

However, Vodolazkin’s venerable monarchs also offer a piercing critique of this kind of history. According to Parfeny, history as written in the Middle Ages “was, to a greater extent, history because it looked at things with less bias”. This claim will leave any modern guild historian reeling, as the modern discipline is marked by a now overwrought attempt to right the wrongs of what people claim are distorted histories written by the victorious and powerful.

But Parfeny gives us pause. “Contemporary historical thought … is formulated by circumstances that are distant from the events described.” Objectivity gained by the passage of time can be a positive. But it also leads to a problem, because modern historical thought “depends on political expediency, which turns historical writings into a tool for a fight”. The modern historian “participates in events with a sideways view” whereas the “medieval historian … looked from above”. Medieval historians sit on the bank “to contemplate the river”, whereas modern historians “float along with the river”.

The telos of modern historical thought could be working itself out in today’s a-historical, or anti-historical, rage against the past. We feel the need to atone for past sins, and the punishment must be meted out on those whose supposedly sinful legacy we have sustained. The past is a place of sin, torment and cruelty. Jean-Jacques Rousseau has triumphed over Edmund Burke. History is a wasteland. Nature, and what we make of nature, is the site of our triumph over history.

As Vodolazkin’s totalitarian ideologue Kasyan states, if there is to be a history it should be tightly controlled and “should not only express the past”. Historians should engage in (note the Soviet-era language) “scientific foresight”. Ksenia laments the decline of the old history about the struggle between good and evil in the face of this. For, “now a monstrous anti-history is establishing itself, repeating events of previous history in broad strokes”. And in the triumph of evil, “black had become white … unreal had become real”.

The rage against history in A History of the Island is mirrored in the West today, and the consequences are working themselves out in many facets of society and public discourse, including contemporary constitutional debates. We are making ourselves permanently beholden to past sins. But as the inhabitants of the Island learn, the battle between good and evil calls for divine intervention. In the end, a supernaturally-inspired act of benevolence prevents the sins of the past from engulfing the Island. Agafon’s prophecy is fulfilled. This history ends with redemption.

At best, it will be a long time before we can recapture this view of history again. But in reading Vodolazkin, we are challenged to reconsider history as meaningful, and not merely the site of transgression. It is the site of triumph and tragedy. It is, in this sense, most human. The human part is, in the mind of the medieval narrators of A History of the Island, also divine, a fact most profound and entirely absent from the modern view of history. God is what we are missing in history, whether we believe in Him or not. Maybe history makes no sense without Him.

A History of the Island
by Eugene Vodolazkin, translated by Lisa C. Hayden
Plough Books, 2023, 311 pages, $52

Simon Kennedy is Associate Editor of Quadrant. He is also a Non-Resident Fellow at the Danube Institute and a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Queensland.