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Around an empty grave
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in If on a winter’s night a traveler, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The Act of Reading
Academia and Publishing
Censorship and Government Oppression
Love, Lust, and Anxiety
Summary
Analysis
The Ataguitanian police let you go on the condition that you agree to go to a foreign country to help them with a secret mission. This is how you end up in the country of Ircania drinking tea with Arkadian Porphyrich, director of the State Police Archives. Arkadian Porphyrich explains that police have similar goals around the world, and so even police of rival nations sometimes collaborate.
Ataguitania and Ircania are rival nations, and yet the Reader experiences them as similar and equally repressive. Ultimately, what connects these different ideologies is authoritarianism, the belief that people should be obedient to authority.
Themes
Arkadian Porphyrich believes that police states hold the written word in the highest regard because they go through such great efforts to ban books. He explains that banned books are such powerful symbols that there are secret treaties in place for exporting books banned in one country to another country, and vice versa.
Arkadian Porphyrich’s comments are darkly humorous—he believes that the people who ban books see them as more powerful than, for example, someone like Irnerio, who likes the exterior of books but doesn’t care about the contents. The secret trading of banned books between countries shows how books can actually take on more power after being banned, but it also suggests that perhaps oppressive governments can still find ways to harness this power for their own uses.
Themes
Arkadian Porphyrich talks about his belief in the Spirit, which involves serving in the police force, supporting the State, and enacting censorship. Although some of these words disturb you, you are reassured when you find out that Arkadian Porphyrich still enjoys reading outside of work. You bring up the conspiracy about apocrypha you’ve been hearing about (involving Ermes Marana). Arkadian Porphyrich is familiar with it, but he and his team have never been able to find the mysterious woman who seems to be at the heart of the conspiracy (likely Ludmilla).
The Spirit is a stand-in for authoritarianism or perhaps specifically fascism (which, like the Spirit, combines strict standards of obedience with nationalism and forced devotion to a state). Interestingly, despite Arkadian Porphyrich represents how these dark ideas can take on a genial appearance, with his tea-drinking and his interest in reading disguising how oppressive his beliefs are.
Themes
You offer Arkadian Porphyrich a copy of Around an empty grave by Calixto Bandera as a contribution to his banned books exchange program. Arkadian Porphyrich says he’ll look into it. In the meantime, there is a very important banned book called What story down there awaits its end by Anatoly Anatolin that the police are planning to confiscate.
Initially, Arkadian Porphyrich’s hospitality seems to intrigue the Reader, showing how ideas like fascism and authoritarianism can be seductive. But Arkadian Porphyrich’s discussion of confiscating a book begins to puncture his illusion of friendliness.
Themes
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You decide to contact Anatoly Anatolin first to get his book before the police can confiscate it. That night, you dream about seeing Ludmilla on a train. You get up the next morning and wait on a park bench for Anatolin to arrive. A young man with a blond beard—Anatolin—arrives and warns you that the park might be under surveillance. Anatolin manages to slip you some papers, but as he reaches into his pocket to get more, two agents dressed in civilian clothes pop out of the hedges to arrest him.
Once again, an element from several of the story fragments bursts into the Reader’s “real” world, with secret agents disrupting the Reader’s exchange with Anatoly. The exchange between Anatoly and the Reader dramatizes how censorship and government oppression can interfere with the relationship between author and reader.
Themes
