‘Time is not all powerful’: the Johannine eschatological vision in Eugene Vodolazkin’s Laurus

Eugene Vodolazkin’s Laurus employs literary ‘distortion’ to capture and convey the eschatological paradoxes of the Fourth Gospel. Having outlined the complexity and contradictions of the Johannine eschatological vision, this article describes how Laurus meets the challenge presented by this vision. Rather than seeking to resolve the tension between vertical and horizontal eschatological dimensions, Vodolazkin reshapes time itself to accommodate both realised and future-oriented eschatologies. This remythologising of time is a distortion that brings the reader closer to the rich imaginative depths of Scripture: a powerful form of resistance to limited, inflexible accounts of the ‘real’.