Anthony Labriola

Love's Cure Anthony Labriola

Anton Sergeevich Antonov and his mamochka, Zoya Ivanovna Antonov, are under secret police surveillance for suspected subversive activities. He is a retired writer who believes he lives an inverted life, like a character out of Gogol. His farcical inversion makes him feel that he has been cured of any interest in the illness of life. He now claims he wants a cure for his obsession with the sickness of love. What are these things called life and love, but irremediable diseases, especially as he grows older? When at last he turns 40, his birthday wish is that this birthday be his last. He agrees with Dostoyevsky in his Notes from Underground on the question of aging: it is bad manners to live beyond forty. To live with smugness, triviality, banality and bad taste-what the hell for? His Gogolian world is now turned inside out and flipped upside down. He can no longer accept the rules imposed by his society, especially the ban on same-sex marriage. Defiance leads to disobedience and its consequence for him and his lover. He should get married, but inverts the desire, in order to choose otherwise. Through the absolute inversion and subversion of what is real and what is not, Anton Sergeevich and the love of his life are fated to confront prejudice and inequality before it is too late.