The law this site traces did not come out of an archive. It came out of four books and one short story by A.M.Sh. — the same drama told three times over, then witnessed once in documents.
Every page below is the opening of a chapter — enough to hear the voice — and it hangs on the station of the arc it belongs to. The author's preface to the trilogy →
← back to the arcBook one of the trilogy A Void of the Right Shape. The world on high, the world of myth, where time is pressed into eternity: Adam asks the question of freedom in its pure form, and the whole Old Testament drama answers him. Nearly every station of the arc has its chapter here.
Book two. The world below, where eternity is frozen into the ice of the twentieth century. The same story of Adam, now read as the story of particular people on the Solovki islands: a monk, a painter, an archivist, a baker. How does a prayer sound behind barbed wire, when God is silent not metaphorically but for real?
Book three: the way out. Fr Pavel Adelgeim passes through the denunciation of a friend, Pascha in a solitary cell and an amputation without anaesthetic — into a fullness of life over which death has no power.
A separate book, documentary rather than fiction: Mother Maria (Skobtsova) and Ilya Fondaminsky in the Paris emigration, and the road from a daughter's grave to Ravensbrück. Here the law of the arc is not retold but witnessed.
A short story, not part of the four books. A house above a lagoon, a telephone line to the capital gone dead — and, one by one through the night, the ghosts of collapsed empires come in at the door: Robespierre, Napoleon, Diocletian, Machiavelli. Each of them has already walked the step this man is still standing on.