As the COVID-19 pandemic rewrites our realities, so do writers around the world take up their instruments to render the new world into text. In the following essay, José Vergara discusses the newest work by Russian author Eugene Vodolazkin, Sister of the Four, a existentialist-absurdist play that cohere’s the writer’s familiarity with the pandemic as subject, and the unprecedented facts of what we face today.
This isn’t Eugene Vodolazkin’s first pandemic.
The author’s initial encounter with a brutal, contagious disease took place across fifteenth-century Russia and Europe, the setting of his acclaimed novel Laurus (2012). In it, Vodolazkin chronicles the life of a healer turned holy fool, pilgrim, and monk; Arseny, as he is called in his youth, first loses his parents to the plague, and after training as an herbalist under his grandfather, falls in love with the sole survivor of a village that succumbed to the same pestilence. He then spends his days atoning for what he considers his sins by serving God and miraculously curing the ill. Disease is omnipresent, as Arseny walks fearlessly into plague-stricken homes to do his work. For him, as it is for his world, this illness is something entirely familiar—it is part of everyday life and has its own traditions of suffering, prayer, and death, imbuing the book with a well-suited sense of apocalypticism. Likewise serving as a plot device, it also draws Arseny into the orbit of various characters.
Now, in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, the award-winning Russian author and specialist in Old Russian Literature has returned for another round. In doing so, he propels us into the era of corona-literature, a subgenre which is sure to spike in popularity in coming years. Published as the first in a series of four separate plays released weekly as audiobooks and e-books starting May 18, 2020, Sister of the Four is Vodolazkin’s attempt to make sense of our shared descent into this surreal existence. The play focuses on the titular four: a group of patients being treated for COVID-19 at the Albert Camus Hospital for Infectious Diseases, an imagined setting whose name immediately establishes Vodolazkin’s wry humor and self-awareness when it comes to literary precedents. The main characters consist of: a pizza delivery impresario with delusions of grandeur who goes by the name Funghi; a writer who has been having trouble producing original work for a decade and a half—totally unlike Vodolazkin with his impressive output; a man who claims to be a parliamentary deputy; and last, the chief doctor who eventually catches the virus himself and, in an apparent reference to Anton Chekhov’s “Ward No. 6,” becomes part of the very ward under his supervision. To round out the primary cast, the playwright includes a nurse, who, at the end of the first of two acts, announces herself to be Death incarnate.
This motley set of characters, the circumstances that bring them together, and plenty of alcohol contribute to Sister of the Four’s carnivalesque atmosphere, where the specter of death—both theoretical and apparently embodied in the Nurse—motivates discussions on everything from marriage and the qualities of a life worth living to pizza toppings. In the face of their impending end, the characters feel compelled to play a game of confessions, resulting in several reveals in the play’s latter half. All the while, the disorder of the day muddles the characters’ ability to communicate effectively. The addition of a French cognac at the end of act one doesn’t help, even if distracts the heroes from their condition.
Vodolazkin has called Sister of the Four an experiment in the absurd, but it’s really an existentialist play full of dark humor (more Sartre than Beckett), and built upon a series of conversations stemming from primarily internal conflicts. That said, it clearly speaks to the oft-cited sense of our world having been flipped upside down. Numerous diary excerpts and personal essays reflecting on self-isolation, the loss of physical human interaction, and everyday reality and memory under the threat of COVID-19 have already been published, but what we see in Vodolazkin’s play is the transformation of a present collective experience into pure fiction and allegory and, thus, the process of mythification that all disasters inevitably undergo, if to different extents. Corona-lit will inform how this pandemic is remembered, much as Laurus’s depiction of the bubonic plague, in part, shapes that particular terror. The most notable factor, of course, is that Vodolazkin gets a head start on things.
While it would be difficult to position Sister of the Four as the first specimen of this new genre, Vodolazkin’s play does establish what may ultimately become some of its defining tropes. Funghi and the Writer, in a drunken stupor, compose their own extravagant conspiracy theory about the Chinese origins of the virus. A radio provides the incessant drone of statistics from around the world that begin to lose their meaning—until one of the characters smashes the device. (Even then, it occasionally continues to chime in, reflecting the impossibility of really tuning out what is going on.) Vodolazkin also emphasizes the toll the situation has taken on health care workers, when it is revealed that all the doctors, except for the hospital’s director, have fallen victim to COVID-19, leaving everyone in the Albert Camus Hospital in a precarious situation.
Such are the readily identifiable markers of the play’s contemporary subject. Of course, despite his background as a historian, Vodolazkin’s real aim is not an account of what we have jointly witnessed over the last several months. Nor is it a reflection of the coronavirus’s effects in Russia, which are, indeed, just as intriguing as the work’s plot. As the situation began to develop, on January 30, the Russian government closed its border with China and proceeded to put several more travel restrictions in place. Community spread was confirmed on March 15, leading to a lockdown in Moscow on March 30. Since then, confirmed cases in Russia have skyrocketed to 633,563, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center. The reported mortality rate (1.4%) with 8,958 deaths, however, has come under scrutiny with accusations of underreporting. Nonetheless, the lockdown in Moscow, where almost thirteen million people live, was lifted on June 9. President Vladimir Putin has remained in the public eye via regular national addresses, while placing much of the response decision-making in the hands of local mayors, governors, and other leaders. Tensions are evident. While Putin held a postponed Victory Day parade on June 24, on the eve of a nation-wide referendum on constitutional amendments that will allow him to potentially stay in power until 2036, Moscow’s mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, promoted watching the event on television. Quarantine, economic hardship, and a strained health care system have led to some of the same effects seen in other countries, as well as others more peculiar and gruesome. Three doctors treating coronavirus patients, for example, have fallen out of windows under strange circumstances. Given that these doctors had expressed frustration with how the COVID-19 situation was being handled in their respective facilities, conspiracy theories have cropped up. An even likelier explanation, however, is more tragic: suicide brought on by their current working conditions.
Despite these dramatic local aspects of the COVID-19 story, and beyond his indebtedness to the Russian dramatic tradition (particularly Chekhov and Maxim Gorky), Vodolazkin opts for a more universal plot. The real question, then, is, what does this pandemic—our pandemic—offer the author in contrast to the bubonic plague of Laurus? Much of Vodolazkin’s work concerns in one way or another the nature of time or, perhaps more accurately, humanity’s conception of time. In Laurus, for instance, Arseny’s Italian travelling companion, Ambrogio, experiences prophetic visions of the future that are casually woven into the narrative. A different sort of time travel takes place in 2016’s Aviator, where the protagonist awakens in 1999 after being frozen in a Soviet labor camp and must piece together his own story and that of twentieth-century Russia. These plots, among others, highlight the author’s fascination with what he suggests is the illusion of time. He aims to find the threads that bind one era to another, to reveal a simultaneity of time through unexpected, even fantastical links.
It’s curious, then, to see Vodolazkin stray from his usual historically-minded approach to pick such a topical subject, especially for his return to theater. On the other hand, there is some logic to it; if so much of his fiction exemplifies his attempt to rupture the traditional view of time, then Vodolazkin’s real subject in Sister of the Four addresses another dimension—space. Vodolazkin sets himself a different challenge with fixed parameters unseen in his novels: a new subject for a new medium.
To that end, he has his drunken Writer proclaim, “The desire to unite has been replaced by something of the opposite. It’s not the virus clinging to people; in this case, it’s the contrary: man has saddled onto the virus in order to escape from globalization. To remember that borders exist . . . and to close them!” The divide Vodolazkin considers here is thus less temporal than physical. The Writer goes on to suggest that this response to the virus is in keeping with the laws of history, which demand periods of contraction and expansion. For the Writer, it’s a matter of perspective: how you consider the comparative mortality rates of diseases and what eventually becomes an event worth remembering. At this precise moment, he suggests, the virus itself is not the real issue, but rather people’s collective desire for distance from one another—reminiscent of Giorgio Agamben’s highly controversial assessment of the pandemic, in which he argues that the virus’s danger has been exaggerated in an effort to expand state power. The Deputy, however, counters that this pandemic is no part of a natural “rhythm,” that the world has truly fallen off its tracks. He argues that the Writer’s view ignores the very real harms of the pandemic—mass death, economic instability, and so on—in favor of an idealistic, metaphysical explanation.
This, then, is what it looks like to write from within a plague. The characters, much as we do, lack the scope and historical perspective necessary to frame the pandemic. The result is a mess of communication, as the characters stumble over each other in arguing about the meaning of the virus. The truth is that that sense of coherent meaning will be impossible to fathom for some time. The Writer, the Deputy, and the others all struggle to come to terms with an existence that now bears an expiration date potentially much closer than previously thought, and in the hospital, the Writer at least strives to mask the horror of the unknown behind a cause rooted in human will.
The dangers of writing about a catastrophe still in progress show themselves here and elsewhere. At the time of composition, based on what the radio announces, the death count in the United States was forty thousand—a milestone that seems so distant at this point. Likewise, the Writer’s argument about the flu mortality rate being comparable to that of this new coronavirus continues to lose traction with each passing day. The difficulty, naturally, lies in the fact that we haven’t come out the other end of the coronavirus’s spread; even if the play does feature an end to the pandemic (and no one dwells on it very much), it can only be speculative and, thus—for the contemporary reader—disorienting. On the contrary, narrating from a retrospective position in Laurus, Vodolazkin can imbue the plague with the metaphysical import and apocalyptic logic necessary to his tale.
So, is it too early for corona-lit? When it comes to abstracted readings of the response to the pandemic such as the one volunteered by the Writer, perhaps. When it deals with the experience of living inside of the pandemic as we are experiencing it, no, not at all. Returning to the idea of historical rhythms, the play itself is structured by a regular time-keeping device. At key moments, the sound of an axe hitting a wall can be heard from off-stage. Initially, the hospital staff explain that they are building an extension to house additional patients. Then, someone suggests that they’re actually constructing coffins in close proximity to make things easier. (The Nurse’s reply that mass graves are used during pandemics doesn’t make anyone feel better.) The true cause is not revealed until late in the play—suffice it to say here that it’s mundane—but this threatening sound obviously acts as a reminder of the characters’ mortality. Concurrently, it symbolizes the dramatic transformations the world is undergoing all over—another Chekhovian allusion, echoing the haunting sounds heard off-stage in The Cherry Orchard that likewise emphasize the shifting of the heroes’ fortunes.
As Sister of the Four concludes, a character announces, “I’m really nervous . . . We’ve gone through a lot here, gave serious thought to a lot of things . . . It turned out that none of us have died yet. But our life, believe me, will not be as it once was. Never.” Vodolazkin’s play succeeds best when it gives voice to the changes we are undergoing—not their ultimate results or even causes, but the processes of trauma being inflicted, the constant knock of the axe that relentlessly and sometimes imperceptibly morphs our reality. The characters’ jumbled dialogues full of despair and the plans to shift their trajectories “after all this is over” resonate with ours. Vodolazkin’s heroes may thank the pandemic for the opportunity to reconsider their lives, but the future remains just as elusive, despite their intentions.
Viewed in this light, Sister of the Four comes close to Chekhov’s “laughter through tears.” While many other coronavirus-inspired writings emphasize the paradoxically communal experience of quarantine—the call for unity to sacrifice for the common good, and, perhaps, an empathetic sensibility—Vodolazkin favors something more cynical and intellectual. There are no satisfying answers for his characters, nor are there any cathartic stories for us—yet. For the time being, we are frozen, awaiting our escape into post-coronavirus history, if ever there should be such a thing. Until then, Vodolazkin’s haunting twin plagues can together alternately pull us apart and bring us closer, destroy the bounds of time and emphasize the space between us.
José Vergara is Visiting Assistant Professor of Russian at Swarthmore College where he teaches courses on Russian language and culture of all eras. He specializes in prose of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with an emphasis on experimental works, and his current primary research project examines literary responses to James Joyce. He has published articles on writers including Vladimir Nabokov, Mikhail Shishkin, and Sasha Sokolov in a variety of journals. His website is www.josevergara.net.
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