A World Transgressed: Icon and Iconoclasm in Eugene Vodolazkin’s Laurus

Abstract

Abstract The subject of this article is the iconic meeting of divine presence and divine absence. In the icon, divine presence is scandalous: the icon speaks of the impossibility of correspondence, the impossibility of making God present, and at the same time of the reality of divine presence. Nothing of or in the icon is commensurable to this divine presence; yet this poverty of the icon is its witness to the nature of a presence that transcends the paradox of compresence and exclusivity. This essay develops this account of divine presence in conversation with a reading of Eugene Vodolazkin’s novel Laurus and its depiction of holy foolery. Drawing parallels between divine presence in the icon and the scandalous and transgressive compresence of profane and sacred in the novel, the essay argues both for the iconic character of the novel and, consequently, for the novel’s illumination of the incarnational logic undergirding the icon itself.