Eugene Vodolazkin’s masterful novel Laurus is a tour de force of literary imagination and theological reflection. In a style reminiscent of Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov and imbued with as much tragic conviction as Nikolai Leskov’s Cathedral Folk, Laurus stands out as a modern-day masterwork of Russian literature. The novel is full of mystical, sacramental, and eschatological imagery. Vodolazkin marries the mundane to the sacred in a beautiful tapestry of man’s fallenness and God’s redemptive plan. The main character, called at various times