Only words help us to overcome distances

Mikhail Shishkin is one of the great contemporary Russian storytellers. For years he has lived in Switzerland by choice and above all because over time he has become increasingly disliked by Putin's regime. In his books, in fact, Mikhail Shishkin recounts the soul of Russia, the deepest and most rooted one, with its virtues - the greatness of culture and literature, to give an example - and its vices - the anxiety of power and imperial ambitions. The son of a Russian father and a Ukrainian mother, Shishkin experienced firsthand the slow and inexorable slide of Russia and Ukraine towards a war that the writer in many of his interventions in recent months has defined a monstrous tragedy.

For all these reasons, the expectation for the publication in Italy of his latest novel, “Punto di Fugue” (21lettere editore, 2022, pp. 448, also e-book) has increased. It is an epistolary book that begins with the letters that two young Russian lovers separated by war have exchanged over the years.

THE PLOT - He is Volodya , an aspiring writer, obsessed with the idea of death and driven by the desire to "feel life", to savor it to the full in every aspect. For this he decides to leave as a volunteer in the Boxer war that broke out in China in the early twentieth century. She is Sashka , a young woman who has to deal with the limited prospects - especially for a woman - of the monotonous Russian province.

Letter after letter we get to know them more deeply, we enter their lives and their souls. We reconstruct their family history, relationships, we listen to their thoughts. We share their love, a poignant , strong, naive and overwhelming love. Above all, she talks about her daily life in the family while he remembers the boredom between one battle and another and reflects on the infinite cyclical nature of war and the universality of death.

SPACE AND TIME - Vanishing point, however, is not limited to the story of a love story and distance. Continuing the reading we realize that Sashka and Volodya are not only separated by space, but also and above all by time. The letters of one chase those of the other and vice versa. Volodya sends his letters from the front over the course of a few months of war, Sashka instead writes and replies to his beloved for years almost to the present day. Thus Sashka's images of daily impatience - a device that Shishkin also uses for a critique of modern Russia - alternate with Volodya's thoughts on the dehumanizing conditions of war.

Often the letters do not even have an answer, they probably do not even reach their destination. Yet, the correspondence does not stop because for both protagonists communicating is essential to continue to feel alive and in relationship with each other and with the world. “Not only the letters that remain unwritten arrive” explains Volodya not by chance and adds: “All the present is insignificant and futile if it does not lead to words and if words do not lead to him. Words alone justify the existence of things in some way, they make sense of the moment, they make unreality real, they make me myself ”. In this way the young man - and with him the author of the novel - claims the revolutionary force of the word , the only true antidote to the oblivion of conscience, to loneliness, to the fury of war. In this way the bond between Sashka and Volodya becomes a symbol of every human bond capable of resisting time and distance. Able to stay alive despite the collapse of the surrounding world. Able to give joy of life, mocking even the senselessness of death probably known by Sashka in the first months of the war.