4 ideas
The runaways (bieguni), a sect of Old Believers, hold that evil and worldly power can only seize what stays in one place, so constant movement is a way to escape being captured. The book takes this as its governing idea: a person who stays in motion, never settling into home, property or a fixed identity, cannot be pinned down, categorized or possessed.
On holiday on the Croatian island of Vis, Kunicki's wife Jagoda and their small son disappear during a stop on a country road. The return does not repair things: Kunicki becomes obsessed with the unexplained gap, and the episode shows how a single missing stretch of time can make a familiar person, and a marriage, permanently unknowable.
The seventeenth-century Flemish anatomist Philip Verheyen had his leg amputated and preserved it, then later dissected it himself. He went on to feel pain in the missing limb. Studying his own detached body part, he asked what remains of the self when a piece of the body becomes an object, and how the absent part can still be felt as present.
Plastination, preserved specimens, and Chopin's heart smuggled in a jar of alcohol by his sister from Paris to Warsaw show the body treated as matter that can be kept, displayed and carried across borders. Seen this way, preservation becomes a way of fixing what is otherwise constantly in motion. It also shows that relics and specimens turn a person into a symbol, one that nations and institutions can then claim.