“Writers are the mouth of the people. Someone has to be the one to say that the emperor has no clothes.”

The first thing I wanted to ask you about was the speed at which time flows in your novel and seems to in the present day. There are two protagonists in the novel who live for a very long time; their lives last several centuries. They’re surrounded by people living at our usual, ordinary pace. Thanks to this, double optics are formed within the book in a remarkable way: there are people who live for a long time and thus slowly, and there are others who live for a short time, and therefore very quickly. Is it just the length of life that determines how fast time flows? And will this slower pace of life we’re currently experiencing have any long-term consequences in the future?

All my novels are about time and that’s particularly true of this one. This novel is also about history, which is itself also about time. History began when Adam and Eve were banished from the Garden of Eden. They find themselves on Earth, where there is time — something they previously lacked. Time is finitude and finitude implies death, so they are both now mortal. It was hard for the first people to get used to this idea and so they were given a long time to come to terms with their new circumstances. Adam lived for 930 years, and Methuselah lived to the age of 969. What they had to deal with was so big that they needed all this time.

As one chronicler says in the novel, everyone has their own time. That’s obvious. Time is closely linked to experience and the intensity of events, which make time short or long. This relativity of time would make our existence impossible if we didn’t have common time with a calendar that lets us meet at the correct time and place.

One of the protagonists in your novel says that time used to be common because history was common. Everyone looked to the centre, where they saw God. This view preserved a certain unity: everyone looked at the world in the same way. Do you not think that we’ve now returned to this idealized map where we’re looking in the same direction again and our history has the chance to flow once more from many little rivers into one big channel?

I think this confluence will be temporary. There are other developments in the world that on the one hand are synchronizing everything and on the other dispersing everything. All the processes consist of opposing forces. What is important is which of them are stronger. I think that the force of divergence is stronger than the rest and this will probably mean that there will be a certain atomization. From what I’ve observed, the modern era is over.

What do you mean by “the modern era”? Do you mean the period that text books refer to as following the Middle Ages or the Renaissance?

I’m talking about a change in the type of civilization, just as the Middle Ages gave way to the modern era. Recent history is now giving way to something unclear, something that’s still hard to identify. But for me it’s obvious that what we consider postmodernism is a return to medieval poetics. I’ve studied this my whole life, so I know it. All the laws of postmodernism fit into the laws of medieval poetics — centoism and the fragmented nature of texts. In the Middle Ages, texts weren’t written; they were compiled. All literature in the Middle Ages was non-fiction as what’s described in it are real events. Even if they weren’t real, people believed in them.

Contemporary literature has already grown tired of its literariness and started to mimic non-fiction. I’m talking about memoirs, and literature that resembles Sergei Dovlatov’s. In addition, there are many other things that show that there’s currently a tectonic shift and plates have already converged. Because of its extreme sensitivity and responsiveness, literature is one manifestation of these changes.

The internet came along and turned everything upside down. The internet is an extension of our mental features, which have suddenly acquired amazing opportunities to be realized. We still haven’t recognized how momentous these changes are. Previously, very few people had the right to public expression but now, as we see, virtually everyone has it. What’s more, motivations for expression are very varied, and they can go round the world within seconds. This has created the particular new field where we have the pleasure of finding ourselves.

Through my online life I see a lot in people that I didn’t see before; they malign and insult others and say spiteful things. Do you think we’ve become worse, or has the new environment we’ve found ourselves in revealed things that used to be hidden?

I think people are the same. The internet has proved a big temptation, like all human discoveries. Nuclear energy came along; you would think we’d use it to keep warm, but we ended up using it in bombs. Unfortunately, people only grow in a technical sense, and they remain virtually unchanged morally. The internet has become a stick to beat people with. Of course, there’s a lot on it that’s useful, but there are plenty of terrible things too. It’s become a tool for collective persecution and blackmail.

It will be very difficult to deal with this but it’s no coincidence that it’s all happened, just as it was no coincidence that Gutenberg’s printing press came just at the moment when it needed to. The internet came at the very moment when a full stop needed to be placed at the end of recent history and the unification of the world needed to be taken to the point of absurdity so that having plumbed the depths, you could then come quietly back up to the surface.

At least two of the protagonists of your novel are convinced that everything was better in the past when there was a uniform time, a common notion of history, and a common understanding of the historical past. It’s always difficult to know at what point the protagonist is voicing the author’s thoughts and where they’re not.

Do you personally prefer it when the world is fragmented into a multitude of bubbles where times moves at different speeds or when there’s a kind of centre that creates a uniform understanding of time?

What’s important are boundaries. Not the type you can’t get through but the type that places a distance between people. If you don’t have that, then you don’t know where your self begins and where someone else’s starts. The most unpleasant things on Earth happen precisely when people are in a merged condition like this. The psychology of the crowd is different from that of an individual, and all the calamities of the twentieth century stemmed from exactly this.

The world has moved towards a general confluence. It would be foolish to say that this is due to someone’s ill will. In harmful processes as well as good ones someone’s will is of no significance at all. ВЫНОС: However, it’s a characteristic of evil is that it spreads easily; it’s often appealing and aesthetically pleasing, whereas good is difficult to describe. I tried to describe it in Laurus and went back into the fifteenth century. In the end I gave up trying to describe a positive contemporary protagonist because however you describe him, it’s all a lie.

If the world that you’ve created in your novel is saved for the sake of two righteous men, it means we too can have hope that things could be all right in our world. Are there also people for whom you think our world is holding out?

Yes, I do know people like that. They’re not well-known names but they’re doing things that I certainly couldn’t. I know people who are able to compensate for the weakness that you and I have. I know people like that in Russia and other countries, so of course there is hope.

I would like to touch on the theme of public rhetoric, which now happens mainly on social media. It seems to me we now live in a time of remarkable stylistic confusion when people you least expect it of suddenly start speaking in the most unexpected and unimaginable way. We all have certain ideas about the limits of what’s acceptable. These limits are now being redefined, and it seems to me that this primarily concerns language.

As in Laurus, your novel is built on a powerful mixing of different linguistic layers. In Laurus there are fragments of what is almost Old Russian, neutral modern language, and also comical sprinklings of officialese. A Justification of the Island is made up of linguistically diverse layers. When I was reading the novel, I had the happy feeling that it was an example of how confounding linguistic expectations can give rise to something wonderful. I wonder whether a complete erosion of stylistic boundaries would be the start of something productive and whether something good would grow out of it as it does in your novel?

I think any medium can be used for good or ill. What’s important is who uses it and why. And with combining different linguistic layers it’s the same thing. Sometimes language becomes so worn out that it’s just not possible to fit new meaning into it; the words turn to dust.

A lot depends on the era. For example, can you imagine talking about the Russia of the 1930s in Bunin’s language? It’s like two different planets. The feeling of a broken time and an upended social order can only be conveyed in a crippled, broken language of the type that Platonov, Kharms, Zabolotsky or Babel used.

I think we’re in a similar situation today. I’m not talking about totalitarianism; I’m talking about the state of the human spirit. To paraphrase Bulgakov, evil isn’t an old woman with a walking stick, evil is someone walking down the street and kicking a homeless person; it’s when someone does things that are completely unthinkable. This has all been present in different societies at different times, but the pertinent issue is how prevalent it is, and at the moment it’s very widespread.

There’s a huge amount of it on the internet; it’s already on the verge of absurdity. There are examples in every sphere, but in the literary world there are mobs that destroy everyone and everything. Previously, there were jealous individuals with their own grievances who counted sales and prizes, but now people will cold-heartedly use technology to whip up a scandal as a strategy for success.

These things can only be captured with a particular language and syntax that encapsulates the rhythm of life better than ordinary language.

The picture that’s emerged from our conversation is shaky and unstable: everything’s broken – history, time, and the language that describes it. You wonder what the point of writing is in this situation. This might sound rather harsh but all the same: in our broken, inconclusive, and transitional world where there’s nothing uniform, reliable or constant, why are writers needed?

Writers are the mouth of the people. Someone has to articulate and describe what’s happening. Someone has to be the child who says that everything is absurd and the emperor has no clothes, so that we can at least recognize it, even if it’s not clear what should be done. You probably just need to take yourself by the scruff of neck and do whatever it is that you yourself need to do and not try to fix the whole world.