Abolition of death

Abolition of death is the radical ideal that human beings might end mortality permanently, an idea Boris Abramovich Ansky develops in conversation with the science-fiction writer Efraim Ivanov. The novel places this hope beside incompatible explanations of death and against scenes in which institutions handle dead women as cases, bodies, or anonymous remains. Its force lies in that distance: the aspiration to abolish death confronts a world that repeatedly fails even to recognize the lives it has lost.

A revolutionary ideal

Ansky’s hope grows from his belief that revolution could spread worldwide and bring progress and happiness. For him, this political expectation culminates in the possibility of abolishing death. The idea is not merely that death might be understood differently or followed by another life; Ansky insists on its abolition, forever, and on plunging into the unknown until humanity finds something else. The repetition of abolition gives the proposal the character of an imperative, while its destination remains deliberately uncharted.

Ivanov objects that death has accompanied humanity from time immemorial. Ansky answers by turning that very permanence into the reason to challenge it: if death has always been there, ending it becomes the point that matters. Their exchange makes the concept a disagreement between historical inevitability and utopian refusal. It does not show that death can be overcome; it reveals how Ansky’s revolutionary imagination reaches beyond political transformation toward a remaking of human existence itself.

Competing accounts of death

Elsewhere, a dinner conversation after visitors return from a crypt presents death through sharply different positions. Hoensch calls it an illusion under permanent construction. An SS officer instead describes death as necessary, assigning it a regulatory function in a world otherwise filled with living creatures. The young scholar Popescu understands death, in an Eastern tradition, as a passage, but cannot say where that passage leads. He proposes that its destination depends on one’s merits, making an unknowable afterlife answerable, at least in principle, to personal worth.

General Entrescu shifts attention away from destination and toward movement: what matters, in his view, is continuing to move, a dynamic that makes human beings and other living things equal to the stars. Baroness Von Zumpe calls death a bore, while several military figures offer no opinion. The scene does not settle the dispute. Instead, it places metaphysical speculation, biological necessity, spiritual passage, motion, and boredom in one conversation, showing that death’s meaning changes according to the speaker and the framework being used.

The discussion of murder that follows makes that instability institutional as well as philosophical. The SS officer calls the word ambiguous and imprecise; Hoensch agrees. General Von Berenberg defers to courts and judges, treating a legal ruling as decisive. Against these positions, Ansky’s ideal is more absolute: not a new definition of death or a better rule for judging a killing, but the imagined abolition of the condition itself.

Ansky and Ivanov

Ansky and Ivanov become friends after meeting at a literary café in Moscow, on its terrace beneath a large oak. Their intellectual bond rests partly on Ivanov’s interest in Ansky’s unusual ideas and partly on Ansky’s unreserved admiration for Ivanov’s science writing. Ivanov rejects the popular label of fantasy writer, a distinction that gives their conversations a grounding in competing ideas of what imaginative literature can claim.

Their friendship does not mean they share the same horizon. Ansky imagines that revolution can yield progress, happiness, and the abolition of death; Ivanov directly says that death cannot be abolished because it has been part of human life from time immemorial. Ansky’s response—insisting that abolition is precisely the point—keeps the ideal alive as an act of refusal rather than an agreed prediction. The passage supplies no practical method for achieving it. The force of the exchange comes instead from the scale of the ambition and the persistence with which Ansky names it.

Chaos, history, and the limits of hope

In his last notes, Ansky considers what might remain when the universe, time, and space themselves die. His answer is zero, nothing, but the thought makes him laugh. He recalls a saying from the peasants of Kostekino: behind every answer lies a more complex question. That maxim places the abolition of death within a wider habit of thought: a definitive solution repeatedly opens onto further uncertainty rather than closing inquiry.

Ansky also ponders parallel universes and writes that only in chaos are human beings conceivable. As the historical frame darkens—Hitler invades Poland, Warsaw and Paris fall, and the Soviet Union is attacked—the grand hope of ending death stands beside an unfolding war. One night Ansky dreams of a sky like a great ocean of blood; on the final page of his notebook he sketches a map for joining the guerrillas. The contrast does not turn his ideal into a fulfilled promise. Instead, the sequence leaves revolution, mortality, historical catastrophe, and the unknown in unresolved tension.

Death made material

The novel’s treatment of murdered women supplies a concrete counterpoint to Ansky’s abstract aspiration. Esperanza Gomez Saldana, thirteen, is identified, examined at a police station, photographed, and autopsied; her death is recorded as strangulation. A separate victim is found at a dump after a factory executive reports the body, and a policeman accepts money from an executive before the woman is taken to the hospital. In another case, Emilia Mena Mena’s body is found at El Chile, an informal dump with a population that never falls below three or exceeds twenty. The novel also records that an unidentified girl’s body is sent to the University of Santa Teresa for medical students.

These episodes do not directly answer Ansky’s philosophical argument, and they do not establish that he knows of them. Their juxtaposition instead reveals a sharp difference between imagining death’s abolition and confronting the ways death is administered, classified, or left without a name. Ansky’s ideal seeks an end to mortality; the recurring record of unidentified victims exposes a prior failure: the failure to secure recognition and care for the dead. The concept thus remains both expansive and sharply bounded—an imagined break with the human condition, narrated in a world where loss is ordinary, unevenly registered, and never resolved by speculation alone.