The Last Litany of Lunev [Installment 2 of 2]

Editor’s Note: You may wish to read The Last Litany of Lunev [Installment 1 of 2], before the material below.

Translator’s Comments:

In the dim corridors of the National Library of Argentina, fate played its cards. My search for documents on Cold War espionage for an unrelated project, through some cosmic irony, led me to an obscure and forgotten manuscript of Borges tucked playfully in the corner of a folio on Lunev: “The Last Litany of Lunev.” This was fortuitous, as I was at that time considering changing the focus of my PhD studies, and this document provided such an opening.

Borges here seemed to intertwine reality with the surreal even from beyond the grave. This was clearly an early draft, a sketch of an idea perhaps considered too intricate or flimsy to execute in his time.

Stanislav Lunev, the covert protagonist, wasn’t purely a creation of free imagination. A once-decorated officer of the Soviet GRU, Lunev defected to the United States in 1992, disclosing vital intelligence about Russian espionage activities. In this tale, Lunev collaborated with scientists, engineers and architects bracing for the nuclear winter, as well as record-keepers such as the unnamed Journalist. Was it a world where the Bay of Pigs had a different outcome? It’s left ambiguous. All that’s clear is that choice requires our ignorance of the future. Living in the Bunker is to be already beyond that horizon. We might imagine an endlessly branching spider web of seeming infinite complexity, ultimately terminating with a final strand.

The narrative uses post-nuclear apocalypse as a literary device, revolving around the Bunker, a figurative and perpetual last bastion. The Bunker is eternal, timeless, that is, in a literal sense, outside of linear time. It is a threshold, a boundary that can only be approached but never crossed. “Time is a spiral, a collapsing orbit, and the Bunker is its center.” Clearly a reversed reference to the Liber XXIV philosophorum. Rather than no center and omnipresent circumference, we find the opposite, and so the “collapse,” a spiral rather than a circle.

Instances of the Bunker’s appearance are like an avatar in regard to a godform, or the sun (source of light) contrasted with the moon (reflecting that light back at us, all of Creation). In countless scenarios of mass extinction on any Earth once teeming with humans, the specifics of that ending are equally inconsequential.

The Bunker signifies the juncture where human tales—whether joyous or grievous, hopeful or desolate—cease to have meaning. The “Event Horizon.” While it represents an effort to safeguard our legacies—seed vaults, arks, museums—one must ask: for whom? Often, preservation becomes a hollow ritual, performed out of routine, stripped of hope or anticipation.

Addressing phenomena as final as extinction inherently challenges the notion of discourse. An author is cornered by this dichotomy. Perhaps Borges envisioned Lunev as the life that is beyond a need for explanation, and the author as his witness. A kind of neo-Freudian Id and Super-ego.

The distinction between the factual Lunev and Borges’ Lunev might bear concealed implications. Was it the melancholy reflection of a spy trading one confinement for another? Or perhaps Borges’ contemplation on our innate desire to narrate, to bestow significance? Venturing deeper into Borges’ world always involves the unraveling of multiple layers. Here, the duality of Lunev—the ‘real’ defector and the fictional observer of humanity’s final act—suggests a meditation on the nature of existence itself. By placing Lunev in this dual role, Borges challenges the idea of definitive reality.

You will notice that Lunev plays no real role in the story; yet he has been placed at the center of the labyrinth, perhaps as a nod to Heidegger’s “throwness.” Ultimately, Borges appears to have retrieved Lunev from historical obscurity, spotlighting him in humanity’s concluding drama, merely to assert that our storied past and artistic endeavors were fleeting.

The text introduces the concept of “cargo cults of mental habit” as an indicator of our collective reliance on past models of thinking. This term has roots in anthropology but extends here into the realm of cultural critique, reflecting our propensity for repetition and mimicry, even when we no longer comprehend what is being replicated.

When the narrative broaches the subject of immortality and grave as being two sides of the same coin, it seems to draw upon Ernest Becker’s theories in “The Denial of Death.” The underground Bunker, much like ancient monumental architectures, is both a sanctuary and a tomb; a physical structure aimed at overcoming human finitude and an eternal resting place for those who built it. The womb/tomb analogy is facile, but clearly present. More pointedly, the Bunker is a trans-temporal sepulcher, a monument, an art museum, and in the end, a forgotten grave, with the name rubbed away.

Borges’ deliberate obscurity and interplay between fiction and reality also serve as a critique of our tendency to constantly seek the final word, to comment, postulate, theorize and equivocate. The human desire to find stories and patterns in everything, even in the face of the monolithic edifice of the Bunker is both our strength and our downfall. The monolith shall remain forever silent.

The Bunker, then, is not just a physical structure or even a symbolic one. It is the embodiment of humanity’s relentless drive to preserve and make sense through the naming of the world (e.g., Landnáma), and to place ownership over that name like a dragon slumbering atop their hoard, even when faced with our imminent end. Above all, that which we have owned will persevere. One might argue that the Bunker serves as an ironic artifact of humanity’s hubris. Amidst the radioactive rubble of Chernobyl and the declassified archives detailing Operation Northwoods, a testament to our desire to assert control through naming and categorizing. What’s in a name when the named doesn’t recognize itself, when the world rejects its own imposed taxonomy?

A handwritten annotation by Borges in the manuscript’s margin only deepened the mystery: “All must follow Lunev in his odyssey.” This solitary remark is the only comment Borges provided on this work with his name attached, which is mentioned nowhere else by either him or his many commentators, as if it was intended to be forgotten. While its provenance has been debated with me on this account, I believe it to be the genuine article. If anything should be able to travel through time, to recall the future as the past and the past as the future, why not fiction?

After documenting and translating this fragment for my PhD, I could finally return home. It felt like the first time I had stepped outside in quite a long time. But the world took on an unnervingly familiar ambiance. Buenos Aires, with its storied past, now only mirrored Borges’ Bunker. This sensation trailed me to Milan, Paris, and eventually to New York. I can feel it underneath all things manifest, casting a pall upon the world. Its essence lingers, shadowing my every move.

This piece first appeared in Modern Mythology.