This is Jonathan Peugeot. Welcome to the symbolic world. So hello everybody. I am very excited to be here with Eugene Vodoleskin.

Eugene is in many people that I've talked to, many authors, Christian authors that are here in North America

or in Europe, he is really seen as paving the way for the future of storytelling, the future of

Christian storytelling. His book, Loris, has made a massive impact on anybody who is attentive

to culture and also to, like I said, Christian narrative and how it is possible

to tell stories today. And so I'm very excited to look at his book because many of his themes

connect with my themes, this idea of the edge of the world, the notion of a universal

history, all of these things

we will be exploring together in this conversation. And so Eugene, thank you so much for taking

time to speak to me from Russia right now. Thank you very much, Jonathan, for your invitation.

And so the novel Loris is really amazing. It really is an amazing story. And it connects both this ancient vision of reality. But it also seems to, at least in some aspect, it seems to be talking about working out through the difficulties of postmodern society.

So we can see these images at the outset of the novel, where the main character is made

aware of these geographic limits of the world, these monsters, the synocephaly, the dog-headed

monsters, St. Christopher. We also hear of the voyages of Alexander. All of these references set up a narrative,

the narrative as an exploration of the limit. And so the context is not just this idea of this limit in space, but also in time.

Because the whole book is layered through this idea of the end of the world or the different ends of the world that layer

themselves on top of each other.

And whether we see this in this prophetic vision, whether it's the facing of death, but also

even in the narrative elements itself, we see a breakdown of coherence of which the main

character goes through himself.

So this breakdown in a linear way of speaking even goes as far as using anachronisms

in the story where you see things impossible things coming from the future, from the past,

...