There are gestures that have the strength of myth, which reverberate with the familiarity of a tragedy represented a thousand times and acquire an archetypal dimension. The announcement by Yulia Navalnaya, Alexei Navalny’s widow, in a video broadcast online questioning Vladimir Putin and explaining that she would continue her husband’s fight belongs to this category. In her words the famous resonated Funeral prayer of Pericles, a speech to name those killed in the Peloponnesian War, which compares two types of state, the open and democratic Athens of Pericles, and Sparta, a militaristic and predatory city-state.
In front of the cameras, Yulia Navalnaya, with a powerful presence, pale and round, trembling and defiant, delivered an elegy that gave meaning to the loss and charted the moral trajectory of an indestructible man. You urged Russians to fight for freedom, not to stand by and watch – “doing little is not bad, the bad thing is to do nothing” –, not to be intimidated – “I’m not afraid. Do not be afraid”―, to face the satrapy of Vladimir Putin.
Navalnaya’s response, with the courage of an Antigone, showed a heroism that transcends eras. Like the character in Sophocles’ play, he began a dialectic of opposites that compares the world of intimacy and the public, transparency and opacity: Navalny’s family, recognizable and accessible, Putin’s, with secret children and a personal life surrounded by mystery―. A dialectic that differentiates the courage of a widow and the fear of the almighty Russian president. And, naturally, it highlights an unappealable opposition between man and woman, the polarity of the sexes, as the philosopher George Steiner wrote in Antigonia relentless contrast between “the noble madness of self-sacrifice” and “the ferocious madness of arbitrary anger and self-deification.”
Another Antigone before the Tsar is Liudmila, Navalni’s mother, who from the doors of the Polar Wolf penitentiary in the Arctic Circle, an extension of the cold Soviet hell where her son’s life ended, demands that his body receive a worthy dignity from the State burial. .
It seemed that Navalny’s death had buried the hope for a better future, a dream desired especially by young Russians. If Yulia Navalnaya, as she has promised, takes the step of succeeding her late husband, it will provide the opportunity to join and lead the opposition; Furthermore, she may even emerge as a charismatic symbol in the fight for freedoms, as Nelson Mandela did in South Africa. Among her assets will be the legacy of Alexei Navalny, elevated by Putin to the status of martyr.
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