Antigone before the tsar

There are gestures that carry the force of legend, that reverberate with the familiarity of a tragedy performed a thousand times, and acquire an archetypal dimension. The announcement in an online video broadcast made by Yulia Navalnaya, Alexei Navalny’s widow, that she would continue her husband’s fight, belongs in that category. Her words echoed the famous Pericles’s Funeral Oration, a speech to honor the fallen in the Peloponnesian War that confronts two types of state, the open and democratic Athens of Pericles, and Sparta, a militaristic and predatory state.

Before the cameras, Yulia Navalnaya — a powerful presence, pale and rotund, tremulous and defiant — delivered an elegy that gave meaning to the loss and traced the moral trajectory of an unbreakable man. She urged Russians to fight for freedom, not to sit idly by — “it is not bad to do little, it’s bad to do nothing” — not to let themselves be intimidated – “I am not afraid. Do not be afraid”― and to face up to the satrapy of Vladimir Putin.

The response by Navalnaya, who possesses the courage of an Antigone, showed a heroism that transcends the ages. Like the character in Sophocles’ drama, she has begun a dialectic of opposites that confronts the private and public world, transparency and opacity — Navalny’s family, discernible and accessible, and Putin’s, with secret children and a personal life shrouded in mystery. A dialectic that differentiates the courage of a widow and the fear of the all-powerful Russian president. And of course, it underscores an undeniable opposition between man and woman, the polarity of the sexes, as the philosopher George Steiner wrote in Antigones, an implacable contrast between the noble madness of one’s self-sacrifice and the vicious madness of arbitrary anger and self-deification.

Another Antigone standing before the tsar is Liudmila, Navalny’s mother, who, at the doors of the Polar Wolf penitentiary in the Arctic Circle, an extension of the icy Soviet hell where her son’s life ended, is demanding his body from the state in order to give it a dignified burial.

It seemed that Navalny’s death had buried all hope for a better future, a dream especially desired by young Russians. If Yulia Navalnaya, as she has promised, takes over from her late husband, it will offer her an opportunity to unite and lead the opposition. What’s more, she could even emerge as a charismatic symbol in the fight for freedoms, in the way that Nelson Mandela represented 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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