The Island whose history we are following is small; it makes no conquests and suffers only one invasion. In Princess Ksenia’s first aside, she remarks, “As is commonly known, we did not have emperors.” Nonetheless, its history is punctuated with strife. Its rulers are arbitrary and frequently tyrannical; the Island is periodically struck by famines and natural disasters. The affliction which Parfeny and Ksenia’s marriage and enthronement is prophesied to resolve (by the Island’s foremost seer, Agafon the Forward-Looking) is an endemic civil war between the island’s north and south. Still, it takes a considerable amount of time and machinations before the royal couple are finally allowed to take the throne. At last, the Island is under the rule of good, wise, merciful, and righteous people who are literally appointed by God. They go on confronting disasters and protecting the Island from disaster for a very—even unnaturally—long time.

Their Royal Highnesses do not die, and they are not corrupted by power. Nor do they at any point really become less beloved. But nevertheless, the people of the Island are gradually convinced that they need something new—that they need progress. The islanders are not oppressed, but history nevertheless tends toward revolution. Parfeny and Ksenia are ousted and replaced by a series of Chairmen, under the title “His Bright Futurity,” who each in turn take power and then descend into madness and absurdity. (Post-Soviet Eastern Europe is the clear inspiration for these wryly funny portraits.) One cuts out the section of the History that recounts the 150-year occupation of the Island by the Apagonians, as if doing so would somehow erase the past, and instructs historians to be more “creative” in their research. Another jumps off a balcony dressed as a bee, apparently under the impression that this will enable him to fly.

As Chairman replaces Chairman, Nifont’s assertion that the Island’s history is no longer circular seems less and less true. Over and over again, the people of the Island choose (or have chosen for them) worse and less competent rulers to lead them into the future and integrate them into the modern world, while their prophesied saviors quietly live on in a somewhat squalid communal apartment. And meanwhile, Agafon’s final prophesy, concerning the fate of the Island as a whole, is still missing. Still, as Prince Parfeny remarks, what good did it do Agafon to know the future when he could do nothing to avert it? Perhaps history is indeed “hastening toward its end.”

But though Agafon’s final prophesy is hidden from the people of the Island for centuries, it is not hidden from us, the readers. It appears before the book even starts, on the page facing the Publisher’s Note:

     And the ground will shake,
     and black water will ignite in the North,
     and a fiery water will begin to flow in the South.
     And ash will float from the heavens,
     and your hearts will turn to ash.

The Island is indeed brought by its new rulers into the Bright New Future. They begin to imitate people from the Continent, adopting their trains and credit cards and fast food. Meanwhile, the natural resources of the Island are bought up by companies on the Continent, and the funds from the sales somehow end up in the Chairmen’s foreign bank accounts. When the volcano at the Island’s southern end comes to life, and a meteorite ignites the oil reserves in the north into a giant torch, and civil war is threatening to break out once again, the terrified people have no one to turn to but the long-ignored Royal Couple—who walk into a volcano to save their people, never to return.  

Thus the Island, in the end, does have a pair of holy and righteous rulers available to protect them from the consequences of their mistakes. But what of the rest of us? Who will save us from the consequences of our folly, of our mad rush into a brighter and brighter future? And who will save the Island next time, now that Parfeny and Ksenia are gone?

In his first entry into the History, Prince Parfeny remarks, “Isn’t the life of a people rather similar to the life of an individual person?” And this, I think, holds the key to the puzzle presented by A History of the Island. In my review of Vodolazkin’s previous novel, Brisbane, I wrote about a conversation between the main character, Gleb, and his elderly grandfather Mefody about how to live. Mefody argued that life is made up of only the past and the present, and the future should be left to itself, for, he says, “The future is the scrap heap of our fantasies. Or, even worse, our utopias: people sacrifice the present to make utopias come true.” As for people, so for nations: we must leave the future to fend for itself, place our hope in a merciful Savior, and learn to be human now.