We are creatures of reference, engaged in private dialogue with the countless dead, blursed to imitate in small ways and in large our own personal Jesus.

Far from the “novel in tweets” that critics warned us about, we’ve instead arrived at the primacy of the disembodied voice as a character in of itself, jostling in the void to be the loudest of them all.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that the story of Elena’s own life is the story of the Russia that was decisively lost in February 2022.

Culpability is offloaded onto the very idea of science itself: unfeeling, inhuman, inevitable. These warnings do not allow for human ingenuity or variety of thought; they cannot imagine another way. But it’s a poor craftsman who blames his tools.