“We need to talk about death, because otherwise we’re like characters on stage in a theatre: if you move the scenery aside, God knows what you’ll see”

World religions long ago declared an eternal war on death. In Christianity this is felt particularly keenly at Easter, when victory over death is celebrated. For their part, science and medicine also wage war with death. The human lifespan is increasing and the desire to live to 120 will soon be more than simply a mainstay of Jewish humour. Culture isn’t able to fight death in the same way as religion, because it doesn’t promise eternal life. It can’t work on death as science can because it doesn’t have any secret materials. Culture subordinates death to the functions of the human spirit and transforms it into material for creative work, and it thus triumphs over death in its own way.

Our guest Eugene Vodolazkin has written that “to remember death is to improve life. This is an optimistic statement because without understanding the secret of death in the sense in which we’re able to comprehend it, we won’t understand life. If life ends with death, what is the point in living? But if death is only a transition to another state that’s something else entirely, and life acquires meaning.” Eugene, the subject of death is present in all your books. Why is that? You don’t give the impression of being a gloomy individual. How did you come to the theme of death?

Maybe the reason I’m not gloomy is that I do think about death. I think it’s a very productive thing to think about. Knowing that they are finite, people want to do and succeed in as much as they can. Yes, this knowledge can sometimes evoke sadness; people can lose heart. But I think that the most natural reaction is a constructive and, in a sense, cheerful attitude to existence. Moreover, death is in essence not a departure but a transition: that’s how I understand it.

I first felt mortal when I was about fourteen. I knew before then that I would die one day, but I hadn’t felt it. That’s what shocked me. After they recognized their own nakedness, Adam and Eve acquired death. When they were expelled from Eden, they obtained time. Time is finitude, and finitude is death. Trying to make sense of that led me to faith. Because it’s not non-existence that’s terrifying: what’s terrifying is the meaninglessness of existence. I suddenly understood that everything I was doing – learning languages and music and whatever else – had no meaning if it ended at the moment I died. And the only thing that gave an answer to these questions was faith.

Artem, artists usually turn to the subject of death when the time comes to think about it. How did you come to the topic?

There’s a joke that art can be about anything at all but ultimately it will always be about three things: freedom, love and death. In my case, the subject of death was part of the environment I grew up in. In my home town, Nizhny Novgorod, you can come out of the shopping centre and cross the road and right there you’ll see slums where the buildings and the architecture itself seem to echo human existence. You only had to fail to heat the house once in the winter and it would gradually start to fall apart, like an old man. The curtain rail would come down, the whole window frame would fall apart, and the chimney would start to fall into the house. That atmosphere haunted me from when I was at school until I grew up.

With time, the subject of death turned from a romantic enthusiasm (because after all, contemplating a certain chaos in architecture is romantic) into an anthropological picture of the world. The subject of death is a completely distinct academic discipline, which has a name: death studies. I was introduced to it by an amazing expert, the anthropologist Sergei Mokhov, along with a whole community of authors who write books and academic works on the topic. I’ve discovered that if you talk about the subject of death romantically but in doing so within yourself as an artist or as an ordinary person you want to change something, it’s essential to go right into the field, to the cemeteries or crematoria themselves (Artem’s latest project is Namegarden; this is a public memorial complex created by Artem Filatov and his fellow artist Alexey Korsi in the inner courtyard of a private crematorium in Nizhny Novgorod – ed.). As an artist you can perhaps improve something in this field. That’s how I’ve got to where I am now.

But is contemporary culture interested in immortality generally?

With time I’ve understood that we value certain things more than others because they are mortal. Death teaches us to look at things and delight in their beauty in the moment. Death teaches us to love life.

The human desire to be immortal and eternal is a very pleasant distraction. Yes, people are starting to live longer. They’re using all kinds of implants and they can believe in an afterlife or in extending their earthly life by enhancing its quality with various nutritional supplements and so on. But all the same, it’s difficult to give a 100% guarantee of immortality. Because as popular culture shows, this long-awaited immortality inevitably brings disappointment.

There’s life eternal, which the church promises us, and there’s eternal life, which science can almost promise us. But what about digital immortality? I think that’s just a beautiful illusion because my essential self won’t be there. Yes, there will be digital footprints that last forever. But my essential self, with my suffering, my hope, and my joy: where will I be in this digital immortality?

Even now it’s difficult to say where our consciousness is. Unfortunately we don’t have any sort of instrument for locating it. The philosopher, philanthropist, entrepreneur and collector Dmitry Volkov is trying to identify something that will help us understand how human consciousness works and whether we in fact have free will. Do people behave exactly as they do and not otherwise because they want to, or are the reasons physical? Last year we heard that there would soon be more dead people than living ones with Facebook accounts. Previously, when people died their pages were just abandoned. Now you can contact some office and sign up to have your social media accounts updated on a weekly basis for ten years after you die. Posts will appear on your Instagram or Facebook account for example and your loved ones will be able to read, watch, like and repost them all. You may dream of digital immortality or you may not, but a sense of that immortality is already with us.

Eugene, one of your most well-known books, Laurus is based on the idea that there is no time. There is space, but no time. But can a writer write a book about there being no death? Or if they do, do they stop being a writer and become a religious figure?

In Laurus there’s no time and to a large extent there’s no space either. When it comes to the time of extension, earthly time, the continuum, then basically it isn’t really there either. That’s partly what Laurus is about.

At the moment I’m reading Julian Barnes’s Nothing to Be Frightened Of. Among other things it’s about how extending human life claims more victims every year, and at a certain point the game isn’t worth the candle. It’s not that pleasant being someone in an inert state. Personally, I wouldn’t want to live an overly long time. This isn’t about being brave, because I foresee that leaving earthly life is a transition to life eternal, and so according to my internal convictions I’m not risking very much. It’s a different matter for people who don’t believe: that’s when there’s a problem. That’s when you need courage, in order to acknowledge that when you die, you’ll simply be absorbed back into the earth.

If I saw that things were going in the direction of immortality on Earth and concluded that this was a penance that had been given to me, then I would probably live. But for me it wouldn’t be a great hardship to live outside the boundaries of ordinary human life. People are born into a particular context for a reason. Birth and death are among the few actions that human beings don’t choose for themselves. People follow a certain path in this world a condition of which is its limited nature. I think that’s a condition that shouldn’t be broken.

Historically, the idea of death and immortality has gone through interesting changes, but it has always been part of a collective experience. Now, people have a very developed personal consciousness and it’s precisely this consciousness that finds the personal idea of death very difficult. Human life is conceived as finite. Nothing else has been presented to us, with the two exceptions of Enoch and Elijah. We don’t have any other examples and evidently, we have to assume that there will never be physical immortality as such: so everyone can relax.

Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh used to say that it’s only true atheists and saints who don’t fear death. This is because atheists are sure that while they’re alive, death doesn’t exist and when they’re dead, they themselves won’t exist. And saints know that death is merely an instantaneous transition to another life. But everyone else fears death of course.

Being afraid is a useful feeling, because you shouldn’t behave as though you’re some hotshot, living the high life. You need to understand that not everyone ends up in a good place, and that really, you need to watch yourself in all respects. So let people be afraid.

We already know for sure that digital footprints can be permanent. What’s more, we now have to go to court to establish our digital right to be forgotten. Eugene, is this a form of immortality or nevertheless an illusion?

It’s an illusory form of immortality, although it’s no more illusory than literature or painting. Strictly speaking you can only be happy about it while you’re on this Earth. This posthumous popularity won’t help you find a nicer place to lie in the cemetery. But I do actually understand those who want to erase their digital footprint, because the internet is such a cesspit that being there brings to mind a line in one of Grebenshchikov’s songs:

“As Manya the goat said at butchers’ congress ‘hanging out with you is not much of an honour.”

Artem, do you count on eternal life through art, through the physical extension of infinitely long existence – or can you do without that?

I think that the most wonderful thing is not to count on anything at all. Maybe we should try not to second guess, and just allow certain things to just happen. If it’s hard to make a decision or to choose some sort of correct path for yourself in relation to death, then it’s virtually impossible to talk about death.

It’s very telling that this event about death and immortality is taking place with an artist and a writer instead of a doctor or a funeral director. This is because it’s precisely art that encounters the subject most often. It’s as though we feel that there’s something alongside us: it might be in another room, behind closed doors, but it’s there. We try to describe it. We try to explain death: we try to give it some kind of voice or form. But it’s elusive and therefore when we talk about death, we end up talking about life.

But when we talk about life, do we talk about death?

Among other things – of course.

The more opportunities individuals and humanity as a whole have to prolong physical life, the more pressingly and often the issue of the right to die comes up. What do you think about euthanasia? Is it acceptable or not, and can art play with this topic?

I think it’s a question of human dignity and human rights when a time comes in which someone who has enjoyed their rights their whole life becomes a prisoner of circumstances and can’t enjoy them any more. I can’t help remembering a point in a film when a wife is at her husband’s funeral and she says “I’m glad that this has happened. Because the person I fell in love with twenty years ago wasn’t with me any more. Illness changed him.”

Yes, in Michael Haneke’s film Amour the ending is about exactly that.

It’s a painful topic. For me, euthanasia is to some extent not just a rejection of the future, however excruciating a future that may be, but also of the past. God forbid that I judge anyone but I don’t feel that I’ve got that right. But if I had any way of influencing someone, I would ask them to be patient. However, that request is once again linked to the fact that I feel that I, like any human being, am created by God. Part of my connection to God is that I don’t recognize that I have a right to end my life, because I didn’t start it. There are some things that are my prerogative, but not this.

As for the example that Artem gave from the film, if you marry someone, you take responsibility for that person and they take responsibility for you, whatever your state of health. I think that’s the only basis on which love is everlasting. I also believe that you will meet the person you love and who you need on the other side. You simply won’t recognize the others. This belief in fact sustains me in many ways and helps me a great deal.

There’s a conventional opinion that Christian culture rejects any taking of your own life. But this is not quite correct. There are saints who have thrown themselves into the abyss to avoid capture by heathens. It’s a not a question of you taking your own life but of what you’re taking you own life for.

Suppose there’s a commandment not to kill. But what do you do in a war of defence, when the enemy bursts into your house wanting to exterminate you and your family? Even the church recognizes that there is a commandment – blessed is he who lays down his life for his friend.

There’s a certain inconsistency here. How can we excommunicate a soldier who’s returned from the front for murder? And how can we say “blessed is he who lays down his life for his friend” when in order to do that you need to “lay down” the lives of others who are attempting to kill your loved ones? It seems to me that’s an insoluble contradiction.

All insoluble contradictions form paradoxes. And some things have to be left at the level of paradox. Paradoxes involve two mutually exclusive truths, and at a certain point, one truth becomes truer.

Do we have a language in our society for talking about death? Or is it still a taboo subject? The old, traditional culture had such a language. Soviet people were very frightened of talking about death and the language for it wasn’t developed. But does a new language exist?

I think that contemporary language is the quintessence of our Soviet and, to put it crudely, peasant inheritance. When I take people round the crematorium for my project, I become a participant in a very intimate and personal process. Sometimes people share their losses with me, and sometimes it happens in complete silence. And the most difficult trips are usually the silent ones. When I discussed this phenomenon with my collaborator, we reached the conclusion that when we try to talk about death we prepare the words but we just end up mumbling about the subject. So I think we say more if we say nothing. This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t talk about death. It means that it’s a thoughtful, skilful and, in the best sense of the word, cinematic silence. That sometimes gives more than a lot of words.

Yes, it’s a well-known and partly rhetorical effect when words lead up to a silence that says more than words.

The better a society lives, the less it talks about death. And the language we use to talk about death is almost always unseemly. My critics’ main complaint against me is that I give so many physical details of death. They say that everyone’s dying in my books. Incidentally, there’s a fragment in Laurus when a Polish merchant, an optimist and a very sympathetic character, says, “In Russia they talk a lot about death and so they don’t have enough time to live their lives.” And Laurus asks him, “So don’t people die in the Polish kingdom?” He says, “They do die, but less and less.”

In Munich for example, they don’t have funerals with open coffins. If that’s what you want, you have to go to the countryside. They say that it’s “not hygienic.” In actual fact, it’s not to do with hygiene. It’s to do with a horror of death, which is always pushed away into some remote corner. However, death is a part of life. For me, a key scene in The Aviator is when the hero goes to the hospital to his love and they say to him, “Help her, we haven’t got enough nurses.” An old woman who’s lying next to her comments that “no one likes washing old women.” And he starts to wash his love. And that’s maybe the highest form in which love can be shown – in illness and death. Sometimes death is repulsive and sometimes it isn’t, but we need to talk about it, because otherwise we’re like characters on stage in a theatre: if you move the scenery aside, God knows what you’ll see.