About a week ago i finished "Doctor Seraphicus" by V. Domontovych and enjoyed this book way more than i expected.
It was written in 1929 and first published in 1947 in Munich. And as crazy as it may seem, the story revolves around a very autistic coded main character, who is very explicitly involved in a platonic polyamorus relationship with his best friend Korvyn and a woman named Ver.
The fact that this book has some of the most relatable lines about queerplatonic love and yearning and it was literally written almost 100years ago.... Insane..
Anyway, i can't just let it sit here in my head so please enjoy my humble translation of some of the paragraphs that illustrate why im insane about it (i will make several parts depending on their theme)
Main character: Komakha (aka Doctor Seraphicus)
His friend: Korvyn
Their girlfriend: Ver
(please excuse any grammar or punctuation mistakes for as the ancient words say: english is not my first language)
They were friends. Used to be! A very long time ago! Back when they were college students. Years have passed since then — six, or maybe eight, nine, ten years... Korvyn could talk about a certain seraphic period of his life, about a period of close and deep friendship with Komakha.
Does it really mean anything, when one says "friendship"? Perhaps, it would be better to say: "affectionate love, tenderness, devotion"? They were boys who thought themselves men; men who remained boys. Maybe their love was the last sign of that strange adolesence on the verge of grown and indifferent matureness. Korvyn hesitated whether he would be able to explain to Ver what was going on because, in fact there was nothing but a blue dream for witch it would be useless to look for undiscovered and impossible words. There are some absent, unreal, unstable moods, that never come to life; factually they don't exist; they are nothing more but hopes, bright sunbeam hopes, that somewhere in this world there is a different, better life.
(...)
Mutual acquaintances would ask Seraphicus about Korvyn: "Where is your wife?"
They would also ask Korvyn: "Where is your husband?"
Just like in physical marriage, when he and she grow similar to each other, sharing qualities and flaws, the same happens in spiritual marriage, but even more often. Korvyn became Seraphicus, Seraphicus became Korvyn, with the only exception that Korvyn was more like Seraphicus, while Seraphicus was a lot less like Korvyn, or perhaps turned out to be nothing like him in the end.
(...)
"Say, Ver. Don't be offended, for it is just an objective interest. I am curious about your friendship with Seraphicus. As I have already mentioned, back in the day, me and Seraphicus were involved in a kind of romance. It was a passionate love — so don't think badly of it — but in the end I just couldn't handle it. He must be the most impossible person in the world. I cannot imagine him to change. In order to be friends with him, one had to free him from his own self, to defeat him. He expressed no satisfaction when I came over. He avoided me. He loved me just as I loved him. At that time I loved three people: mother, my beloved and him. When I was troubled, too troubled, I didn't write to my mother or to my beloved. I wrote to him. My eager love frightened him: he was against us seeing eachother. He advocated that we meet rarely, that he avoid me. For him this was the key to the constancy of our feelings. Now my relationship with Komakha seems funny and naive, childlike, while each person remains the same. I reckon that if he did fall in love with you, he would nurture that very same desire to leave. At all times our romance used to be this way: he loved but would rather withdraw into himself."
Halfway into reading "Doctor Seraphicus" by V. Domontovych and i was not prepared for this book at all... The main character is a heavily autistic & aro/ace coded guy (his last name literally means Insect (Комаха)). At some point he was like yeah i kinda want to be a father but i've got no intention of being with a woman. Why can't I as a man give birth to children without having sex?! *Proceeds to infodump about mpreg to his best friend*
His friend is an artist and in one of the chapters that guy was like: yeah i am definitely in love with Seraphicus (the main character). Hes like a husband to me but I actually have a girlfriend so it's like a platonic polycule situation. No they don't really get along :(
And then literally the next chapter is about that one time the main character went on a vacation, forgot where he was planning to go, went to the wrong town (it took him the whole evening to figure that out) and then he just bought a ticket back home.
The book is called 'Nighttime Fairytale' and I bought it because it had such a pretty design and cover. But those fairytales hurt, oh how they hurt. "I just realised that not a single generation of our people had grown up in peace. Not a single person since our grand-grandparents." And it is truth, isn't it?
