The Silence Before the Beginning: The Metaphysics of Experience in The Beginning

The moment one opens The Beginning, the familiar optics of literature cease to function. This is neither a coming-of-age novel nor a didactic parable: Kadyrov constructs the text as a symphonic score in which philosophical ideas are not declared but lived — with a density usually reserved for sensory experience. Even the title of the cycle, Incubator, implies a double vision: the world is not created but incubated, and each soul is not cast into it but passes through matter along a trajectory chosen before the advent of time.

Novella No. 14 is not called The Beginning by accident. It serves as an entry point into a metaphysical system in which birth is not a start but a continuation, and life is not a gift from above but a consciously chosen route of experience. Kadyrov performs a strong philosophical manoeuvre: he shifts the existential question from “what happens after death?” to “what happens to a life if it was chosen beforehand?” This question becomes the structural axis of the text and defines its unique intonation.

The architecture of meaning

The composition is impeccable. The Prologue, The Hall of Silence, establishes a tone in which time has not yet become necessary and meaning has not yet separated into sound and silence. Kadyrov writes this state with a density reminiscent of late Bunin: the world does not become more comprehensible — it becomes final. The act of choice is depicted not as a volitional impulse but as a consent that exists prior to any “I” — and this paradox already contains the first loss, for “the more precise the chosen path, the more perfect the forgetting”.

Eleven chapters then unfold according to an author-declared rhythmic score: from the adagio of the Prologue through the sensory crescendo of acquiring materiality (sight, hearing, taste, touch) to the uneven breathing of a human life and, finally, to the diminuendo of the ending, where even the word “death” is absent. This is not a decorative metaphor but a structural principle. Kadyrov creates a text that breathes, and this respiratory rhythm keeps the reader inside the metaphysical construction, preventing a fall into either cold theorising or sentimental esotericism.

Matter as a rare gift

One of the most powerful ideas of The Beginning is its reimagining of matter. In the tradition of philosophical idealism, the body often serves as a prison for the spirit; here it is “the only language”, “an instrument through which infinity can experience itself as limited — and, for the first time, not suffer from it but rejoice”. The chapters Matter as an Interface and The Bonus of Existence are filled with an almost tactile delight in possessing a physical form: the taste of bread, the weight of a tired body sinking into sleep, a shiver at an accidental touch, a smell that “is memory before language”. Kadyorov writes this with such sensory conviction that the philosophical framework ceases to be a schema and becomes artistic flesh.

Crucially, suffering is neither devalued nor heroised. The knots of fate — illness, loss, cold — are neither random nor punitive: they are “accepted in advance as part of the form”. The author does not dodge ethically difficult questions: if the soul chose its suffering, does that not devalue pain itself? The answer lies in the concept of the density of experience: “suffering here is not a contradiction to the choice, but one of its densities — just like joy, only heavier to the touch”. This is a sober, almost Stoic acceptance of the tragic, devoid of any hint of masochism.

The recurring motif of encounter

Special mention must be made of the treatment of the Other. The motif of encounter runs through the entire text as a dotted line — from the “presence with a special density of recognition” in the Hall of Silence to the voice on the stairwell and the final dissolution into “one river, having parted for a time only to reunite”. The romantic storyline is not separated into a plot of its own, and this decision is fully justified: what we are witnessing is not a story of a relationship but the metaphysics of intersecting routes. The recognition felt by the heroine has nothing to do with psychological novelty; it is recognition prior to acquaintance, and it becomes the warm, unspoken centre of the text.

The name as a threshold

The introduction of the name Sophia only in Chapter 6 works as a powerful compositional threshold. Kadyorov interprets the name not as a gift but as “the first seal of forgetting”: “before that moment there existed a presence without boundaries <…> and now ‘Sophia’ appeared — a word that separates one thing from everything else, giving form in exchange for infinity”. This contraction of infinity into a human being is perhaps the most powerful image in the novella. The name functions here as an act of creation, almost biblical in scale but delivered without pathos, in the chamber intonation of a delivery room.

Style and language

The language of The Beginning is dense, rhythmic, deliberately devoid of colloquial ease. It inherits the tradition of Russian metaphysical prose of the twentieth century (Bunin, late Nabokov, to some extent Pavić in Russian translation) but does not imitate it — it extends it, with that cool internal heat that distinguishes genuine literature from stylisation. Philosophy is conveyed through imagery; metaphysics, through sensation. This is a rare quality: the text persuades not by argument but by rhythm, not by thesis but by the light on a wall at four o’clock in the afternoon.

Place within the cycle

The Beginning is the fourteenth novella of the Incubator cycle, and it appears to occupy a pivotal position: it is the metaphysical preamble to the entire construction. If other parts of the cycle, as one may assume, explore specific aspects of human experience (psychological drama, social satire, dystopia), The Beginning provides the key to reading them. It explains without explaining; rather, it adjusts the lens. Without this novella, the Incubator would likely remain a collection of sharp plots; with it, it becomes a philosophical system.

Conclusion

The Beginning is a mature, artistically convincing work that does precisely what it promises: it shifts the perception of reality. It does not preach, does not console, does not mystify. It offers the reader a chance to experience metaphysics as an event — quiet, dense, and perhaps the most important one for a reader willing to enter the Hall of Silence and agree to forget ever having entered.