The original book idea for Gulagin viisas (‘The Sage of the Gulag’, August 2025, Into Publishers) was to be a biography, sequel to my earlier research on the fates of victims of the Stalinist state terror. However, ’The Sage of the Gulag’ got published as a biographical documentary novel. Its focus is the protagonist Pavel Florensky (1882–1937), a priest, martyred scholar, and polymath, who was repressed as a counterrevolutionary after the Bolsheviks ascended to power in October 1917.
For a Finnish researcher, delving into Pavel Florensky’s writings has been a rewarding, though long and laborious journey. After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, working conditions changed drastically: visits and contact with colleagues came to a halt. An even more drastic challenge was to address persistently problematic issues in Florensky’s work, such as the silenced legacy of wide antisemitism in Russia. Nevertheless, I believe that neglecting memory work (in German Vergangenheitsbewältigung) makes it harder to recognise deeper currents underlying today’s conflicts. My newly published book aims to combine the researcher’s ethos with the freedom fiction allows in depicting a historical figure.
Researchers and nonfiction writers are committed to facts and truthfulness. Every quoted claim must be checked, and sources must be annotated in footnotes and bibliographies.
Yet some unresolved issues may remain, especially when dealing with sensitive topics and multifarious censorship. One often must resort to “anecdotes,” to protect the informant due to the sensitive nature of the information.
Nonfiction also struggles to fully exploit various narrative techniques: implicitness, allegory, inner monologue, dialogue, poetry, power of imagination. Yet for a reader, the book’s world becomes easier to grasp when the naked facts are accompanied with room for emotional resonance. A naked fact is like juice concentrate, and fiction, when blended in the right proportions, dilutes it just enough to keep the reader’s attention to the final page. “Describe what Solovki looks like,” was the trusted reader’s instruction to the writer.
In addition to story line and narrative techniques, contextualisation is essential: what era and society are we in? What can the reader be assumed to know: and what not?
The background entails a lot of details: What was food supply like during the famine years in a family with five young children to feed? What happens in an interrogation room at Lubyanka? Documents help answer such questions. But it is still up to the author to consider which essential facts and details need to be elaborated to the reader. Fiction permits, or sometimes necessitates, that events are depicted indirectly, rather than over-explained.
Was the step from fact to fiction easy for the academic author? Of course not. But the abundance of Florensky’s manuscripts made the leap easier. So did my previous experience translating literary fiction into Finnish.
This work could never have been written were it not deeply tied to my professional research in memory studies, Gulag studies, and earlier publications. The documentary foundation is evident in the book’s final section, where the main characters are also introduced.
Humanities research explores fundamental questions and is grounded in academic freedom and integrity. These core questions are timeless, but the contemporary situation determines which ones turn focal, becoming public concerns, and whose authority we turn to for answers.
Research on Russia, as Finland’s neighbouring country, is subject to ongoing political passions. A scholar can find themselves facing rejection simply because of the topic. On the other hand, relevance can also fuel research. My own previous research on repressions and the victims’ rehabilitation began with the astonishment at how quickly one collapse could set off a chain reaction. When the Soviet system and military funding crumbled in the early 1990s, the life’s work of many researchers in the narrow military-technological fields fell apart. Secret research institutes (“postal boxes”) serving the military-industrial complex and their tight-knit communities withered away. Mathematicians, physicists, radio engineers, and others left unpaid had to embark on a new path in life.
From a Western viewpoint, it may sound curious, but it was precisely these dismissed specialists who first became interested about Pavel Florensky’s life and oeuvre. Many had ties to the legacy of the Moscow school of mathematics. One of the most famous figures of the Moscow school is set theorist Nikolai Luzin, once a student of Florensky. Decades later, these successors still saw themselves as his secret disciples and sought to rehabilitate his name.
Florensky’s writings had been banned in the Soviet Union since the early 1920s and surrounded by wild rumours. His theological dissertation, his breakthrough work The Pillar and the Ground of the Truth (1914), faced even accusations of pornography.
His religious philosophy, his views on Symbolism, on art and church art, on mathematics and engineer science indeed combined religion and natural sciences, and doing so, broke many conventional boundaries. His wild ideas were the topic of debate, even though only available as underground samizdat editions.
In this context, it’s no surprise that Florensky’s writings had a significant influence on the cultural renaissance along the 1990s and the liberalization of society, including freedom of speech and religious expression.
That freedom, alas, was short-lived. Orthodox religion and studies of Russia’s so called “historical path” were integrated into school curricula, promoting the alliance between nationalism and autocracy. Teachers of Marxist determinism re-trained in the new subject.
Since 2012, President Putin’s policies have increasingly fused chauvinist religious rhetoric with militarism. Even the writings of Pavel Florensky, the persecuted priest and genius scientist, have been co-opted for the uses of blood-sacrificial patriotism. My book’s Lubyanka chapter illustrates this starkly.
Communist state ideology in Russia was long ago replaced by state-sanctioned, militarized Orthodoxy. The ideological labels may change, but my book hints, by tracing key turns and phases in Florensky’s biography and his oeuvre, that the machinery of power and its treatment of individuals has not essentially changed.
Elina Kahla is an established expert in Russian culture and society at the University of Helsinki. She has served at the Aleksanteri Institute since its founding. She also was director of the Finnish Institute in St. Petersburg from 2012 to 2016.
Kahla has translated Russian literature into Finnish (including works by Nina Berberova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Lyudmila Ulitskaya, and Eugene Vodolazkin) and has published academic articles as well as general nonfiction.
This newly published work is her first biographical novel. It was preceded by two academic articles on Pavel Florensky, published in Finnish.