From Gogol to Global Warming:

The absurdist tradition in Russian literature re-awakened

Notes on a Soiree Litteraire at the NSW Writers' Centre by Pyotr Patrushev:
“Russia: Dead Souls Waking”, 6 February 2007 

By Professor  Peter King

 University of Sydney

I was intrigued by the title of Pyotr’s talk with its reference to Gogol’s novel Dead Souls. The talk promised to address “ultimate questions of survival and spiritual growth.”

Pyotr Patrushev, an escapee extraordinaire, writer, translator and broadcaster, found his ultimate escape not only from Russia but also from urban pressures on the shores of Jervis Bay. He told us about his personal history, his own brushes with death both before and during his escape in 1962, which entailed swimming from Georgia in the USSR to Turkey.  Sentenced to Death, which describes his incarceration in a mental institution and his flight to freedom, was recently published in Russia. At his Soiree Pyotr then wove these personal motifs into a larger context, first drawing an extraordinary “population pyramid” of Russia and comparing it to that of Australia. The deaths of tens of millions of people and the huge imbalance between the male and female segments of the population at certain ages (the males bearing the brunt of wars, purges and revolutions) became glaringly obvious.

Is Vladimir Putin (a martial arts adherent, as well as an ex-KGB lieutenant colonel) mortgaging the souls of future generations of Russians by trying to rebirth Russia’s superpower status, flexing his newly discovered petro-muscle? There was only an oblique answer in Pyotr’s talk. He spoke of the suffering of Gogol’s “little man”, whose dream of owning a decent overcoat is shattered when he is robbed by bandits. As if this was not enough, he is later divested of his remaining dignity by corrupt and heartless bureaucrats. In Gogol’s  Overcoat belated justice comes only through the intervention of a ghost-like apparition. Is this all we can hope for? In the tale even the apparition is ultimately suspect. It could even be the robber-in-disguise, using the fearful memory of the past to renew his quest for wealth and power. In new Russia writers are once again encouraged to sound “socially-responsible” themes in order to gain the state’s patronage, and an ex-KGB colonel can brazenly claim the mantle of protector of the arts.

The absurdist link between past and the present surfaced again when Pyotr spoke of his recent book Project Nirvana. An imaginary alternative Soviet Union, confronted with death by a thousand hangovers, decides to combat alcoholism (said by some to be the intermediate stage between socialism and communism) by hooking the population on a plant-derived drug, Socialin. The experiment backfires as spiritual evolution steals the hearts of the proletariat. Could a Western version of Socialin counteract the consumerist urge to turn our planet into a putrid gas-encased garbage dump?  The advertisers certainly would not like it.  

As Pyotr sees it, we concentrate unduly on the bogeyman of illegal drug use, while the obesity crisis, legal drug overuse and the revenue-rich scourge of tobacco and alcohol continue to blight millions of lives. But, far from advocating the legalisation of any drug or plant, Pyotr put on his Gogolian whimsy-hat and spoke of changing human nature with genetic engineering, creating a race of enlightened humans synthesising their food from sunlight, beings who would abhor all addictions, including addiction to animal flesh.

It became clear as the talk progressed that Pyotr believes the reawakening of Gogol’s Dead Souls can only come through an act of creation – an awakening of the dormant possibilities of the human mind and spirit. Gogol, the tormented prophet crucified by the intolerable religious agenda he tried to impose on his art, drove himself into delirium and premature death before he could complete the final volume of his masterpiece. His whimsical and yet fantastically real art, which made millions laugh (and also cry), was not enough for him.

We learned finally that although Gogol was a literary inspiration to Pyotr, his current intellectual beacons are  writers like Jared Diamond, the chronicler of our transition from the lowly Third Chimpanzee into a gluttonous Planet Eater, and Edward Wilson, the sociobiologist turned conservationist who, in his latest opus, The Creation, despite being a convinced atheist, reaches out  to the religious majority, exhorting it to forego the conflict with science for the sake of saving the remaining life on our planet.

Good on you Pyotr. You have certainly travelled far from the confines of the Tomsk Psychiatric Hospital to which, in the bitter winter of 1962, you escaped from the Army Gulag only to have the stern Guardians of the Faith meet you with a straitjacket. I’m glad you did not become yet another missing dot on the jagged Russian population pyramid. Your talk helped us to awaken our souls to the beauty -- and the absurdity -- of the human condition, East and West.

Editor: Pyotr Patrushev’s books and articles can be found on his website, www.russiantranslate.org

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