The Will in the Face of Power

 

Image/Gabriel Ganiarov

Cover of the First Volume

The Will in the Face of Power

There is a question that runs through my tetralogy from its first pages to its final act: what remains of me when someone, from a position of power, decides what I must do and what I must not? It is born in 1941, with Sergeant Doroshenko’s decision, but it does not belong solely to his time.

From then on, a long struggle is waged between power and humanity, one that crosses generations, borders, regimes, and bodies. Institutions change, as do the techniques of surveillance, the pretexts, and the mechanisms of control. What remains constant is the individual’s will facing a structure that seeks to dispose of their destiny. My characters live inside that predicament. They are not confronted only by external events, but by a more intimate violence: the possibility that another may determine who they must be, what they may feel, whom they may love, what decisions they have the right to make, and how far they may dispose of their own lives.

That is why power, in this story, is not merely a political or institutional element. It is a force that penetrates intimacy: it inserts itself into relationships, into desire, into memory, and into identity. It can turn love into a threat, belonging into a prison, loyalty into an obligation, and care into a form of surveillance.

The battle therefore takes place inside the human being. That is the disputed territory.

How far can power go before a person ceases to recognize themselves?

That question accompanies my characters across decades. Some obey. Others resist. Some try to escape. Others discover too late that even what they believed they had chosen had already been decided by someone else. That is the most complete form of domination—the one that manufactures the choice itself—and the tetralogy does not evade the suspicion that arises from it: it puts that suspicion to the test in the realm of love, where we would least want it to be true. Yet resistance does not always take the form of visible rebellion.

Sometimes it consists of loving someone when love is forbidden. Sometimes of refusing to turn the other into a thing. Sometimes of preserving a memory that no one has authorized. Sometimes of retaining, even if only for a few seconds, the capacity to say: this I decide myself.

That is why the conflict between power and humanity is not resolved by the fall of a structure. Power disappears and reappears in another form: it changes uniform, language, flag, and name. What is truly difficult is to recover what it tries to destroy—the awareness that a life belongs, in the final instance, to the one who lives it.

The tetralogy moves toward that point.

Decades after Doroshenko’s decision, Svetlana reaches a limit situation and she too must decide what to do with her own life. But her decision carries a different weight, because it is no longer only a matter of saving herself. And in that gesture something essential occurs: power ceases to have the last word. Svetlana does not prevail by having acquired a greater power than that of the one who oppresses her, but because she preserves until the end the capacity to decide. And by saving another person she does something still deeper: she restores to that person what power had taken away—the possibility of choosing their own destiny.

There the circle closes. Doroshenko and Svetlana are separated by decades and by generations, yet they are united by the same question: what it means to be free when others have the power to decide for us.

The answer lies in the will, in the capacity to preserve a part of ourselves when everything around us tries to appropriate it. Perhaps that is why love occupies such a central place. To love, under certain circumstances, can be an act of resistance. Not because love can by itself overthrow the structures of power (that would be utopian), but because it restores humanity where power seeks to impose obedience.

Blood then learns something those structures never quite understand: that a human being may be subjected, persecuted, watched, displaced, and even condemned, but as long as they retain the capacity to choose whom to love and for whom to sacrifice themselves, there still exists something that does not belong to power. That is, at bottom, what runs through this story from 1941 to Svetlana and Valentina.

It is not merely a story of families, persecutions, secrets, and survival. It is a long confrontation between two forces: the power that wants to decide for us, and the will that refuses to surrender completely.

Gabriel Ganiarov