What does it mean to believe something? Is it possible for a person to profess an idea sincerely, yet discover that he never really believed it? If a man’s actions contradict his beliefs, is he necessarily a hypocrite, or might both the actions and the beliefs be sincere? Which, in that case, does he really believe? How does self-deception work? If a man understands an idea to be false, how can he arrange to believe it? Can he will himself to believe what he doubts? These and many questions haunt the Russian tradition. Explored by the great thinkers and novelists, they have led to insights about the human condition that are one of Russian literature’s great gifts to the world.
These questions occur to the fictional characters of Dostoevsky. But he posed them in his own agonized quest for faith as well. His faith was precisely that: a quest for faith, a process. In what sense?
Andrei picked up an unused bread plate from a nearby table. “This is Bishkek,” he said, pointing to one edge. He swept his finger across the plate’s diameter to the opposite side. “Here is Eugene.” Pronouncing the name of my hometown, he emphasized the first syllable, shortened the second: Yew-jin. “It’s mistika.”
I stood next to him, translating for my friends and relatives gathered on the terrace of a lakeside resort in Wisconsin. It was a second wedding of sorts, taking place almost a year after we signed our marriage certificate in a dank, low-ceilinged government office in Bishkek. There we had celebrated with friends at a hotel outside the city, next to a bluish mountain river that charged over boulders, posing for photos under birch trees that glowed yellow before the sun dipped behind the canyon wall. Our guests raised toasts to wish us many tapochki—pairs of slippers—in our future home.
The last time I talked to my mother, she laughed over the phone from her kitchen in South Carolina, saying she had to hang up to go to the bathroom — a running joke between us. (We both have tiny bladders.) It was July 28, 2024 — a Sunday morning — and I was lolling in bed in my sun-filled apartment in Astoria when I decided to call her to say hi. My sister Ellen, who lives in upstate New York, had the same instinct the next morning. When they talked, my mother mentioned to her that she felt funny — an unusual admission, given how rarely she complained. A lifelong Catholic and daughter of immigrants, she was always insistent that she didn’t want to “bother” anyone. Ellen suggested she go to the doctor that afternoon.
When my mother didn’t show up for her weekly mahjong game on Tuesday evening, her friends in the 55-and-over community where she lived in Bluffton went to her house and found her unconscious and unresponsive on the kitchen floor. They called an ambulance.