Limits, to Be Found Experientially

Navalny Enters Hyperspace

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I first published Limits, to Be Found Experientially (produced in collaboration with Giorgos Terzakis and Jason Novak) in 2021, about three months into Alexey Navalny’s final jail sentence, which, as it turned out last Friday, really was a death sentence. I’m republishing it today.

Navalny’s mother, Lyudmila Navalnaya, is still fighting for the right to receive her son’s body. The siloviki are pressuring her to bury him quietly, in an undisclosed location, at an undisclosed time — to make sure the funeral doesn’t become a political event.

Yesterday, a detective told her, “Time is working against you. The body is decomposing.”

Today, she was offered an ultimatum: in 3 hours time, she either agrees to the secret funeral, or her son will be buried on prison grounds. This was about 7 hours ago.

Lyudmila responded by filing a criminal complaint against the detectives.

The struggle goes on.

Between the poisoning and the jail sentence, Navalny went through a coma; and between the coma and the consensus reality, there was this (quoting from Navalny’s first interview post-resurrection):

The worst thing was the hellish hallucinations, this whole drug trip of the likes you read in Pelevin’s books or in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Except it’s not how the books make it out to be. I can’t believe people pay money for this.

There were several stages to it. Even now, it’s hard for me to separate what was from what wasn’t.

For a long time, I lived in a reality, in which my wife and [my chief of staff] Leonid Volkov came to my room and said: “Alexey, you were in a terrible car accident in Berlin. Here is a professor from Japan. He will build you new legs and a new back.” For some reason, this looked like in the Spider-Man movie — there’s this guy with metal manipulators coming out of his back.

At this point, the interviewer clarifies: “This is you reconstructing what you saw then?”

Navalny responds:

It’s not even “what I saw.” It was more real than you are now. I lived with this for several days.

Of course, this conversation never happened. This was probably either when I was still sleeping, or when I was sitting up, mouth opened, and couldn’t recognize anybody. …

This wasn’t a hallucination, it was a reality. I understood that I was in a hospital, that I was in a bad shape, but that the Japanese professor will make me new legs. And then at night, I suffered from hallucinations. Gradually, the car crash reality faded away.

At the time, Navalny was an inexperienced psychonaut (his three-years-long prison trip, of which about a third was spent in solitary confinement, changed that). Notwithstanding the distinction he made between “hallucinations” and “the car crash reality,” he did seem to consider the Spider-Man version of his life story as less real and more weird than the one we’ve been following in the media — the one where agents of an evil dictator who wears hidden high heels almost killed him by putting a secret chemical weapon into his underwear; where, when he awoke, he was visited by Germany’s chancellor, who spoke Russian to him; where he later decided to come back to Russia (to kill time during his flight, he watched Rick and Morty – a cartoon about risky adventures in the meta-verse), only to be arrested, transferred to an Arctic prison called Polar Wolf and finally killed one more time; where his mother has to play tug-of-war with the state in an attempt to get his dead body.

Limits, reposted below, provide broader factual context about this same reality — which Navalny shared with you and with me — and hint at the dizzying possibilities that lay beyond it.

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