LIBRARY OF IDEAS

VYACHESLAV PYETSUKH:
HYPOTHESES OF A REALIST

Vyacheslav Alexeyevich Pyetsukh is a writer whose books reflect on Russia’s destiny and the Russian way of being. It should be
noted that his position as an observer and describer of Russian life is beyond any reproach. Vyacheslav Pyetsukh has cleverly
escaped from any possible critical nit-picking. It would be impossible to accuse Pyetsukh, as a historian and man of letters, of not
knowing the psychology of the intelligentsia. Nor could anyone suspect a person who lives the greater part of the year in the Tver
Region countryside and is accustomed to peasant labor, of not knowing the rural way of life, or of being remote from the people.
One might even see Pyetsukh as a kind of man of the future, who has learned to combine intellectual and physical work: from 6:00
a.m. till noon he is at his writing desk, after which he does farm work until evening. It is like in Mayakovsky’s poem: “…He’ll till
the earth, he’ll write poetry.” The publisher’s note on the cover of one of his latest books, Fools and Madmen, says: “Vyacheslav
Pyetsukh is a mirror of the Russian intelligentsia.” But it seems to me that the sentence needs to be completed: “…which reflects
the life of the Russian countryside.”

Irina Lebleu

Literary critics have already defined Pyetsukh’s prose
as “alternative literature” or “ironical avant-garde.»
Those definitions are used in Moscow University
publications and school course recommendations. The
term “non-traditional prose” is sometimes applied.
Yet, what could be more traditional (in the best sense)
than the prose of Pyetsukh, who won’t let “the precious
golden thread, connecting the culture of our own and
future generations,” be broken in our time? And what
would you give for the titles of scholarly articles on
V. Pyetsukh’s prose? “Multi-actant prepositions in
Russian as exemplified in texts by V. Pyetsukh”!
Such, in my view, is the complex phenomenon of
the writer and farm laborer Pyetsukh. And that is why
he is the one I wished to ask my questions about culture,
rural life, the fate of the Russian language, progress,
and even... how the heroes of Vyacheslav Alexeyevich’s
most recent tale attempt to realize the ideas of the
philosopher N.F. Fyodorov on the resurrection of the
dead. Traveling to meet V. Pyetsukh in the countryside
was just as the author describes: “Roads whose quality
becomes no better when they imperceptibly blend
into the streets of towns are essentially not roads, but
a kind of special defensive fortification against less
than reliable neighbors. The roads are always there to
protect you, in case of need”…
Lebleu: Vyacheslav Alexeyevich, in your speech at
the conference on Gogol in Today’s World, you lamented
the impending disappearance of readers, and said that
«a process of devolution from Gogol1 to macaque» was
under way... In your tale “The Town of Glupov in the
Recent Ten Years,”2 you even allowed yourself the
following ironical remark: “In brief, the people of a town
with ancient cultural traditions … had sunk so low, that
they read with loathing even what was written on labels
and matchboxes.” Do you suppose that a «point of no
return» has already been passed, or are there still some
prospects? After all, literature does continue to exist…
Pyetsukh: As a man of letters, I may entertain a
whole range of hypotheses about what we have to

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 The Noosphere

look forward to. Mankind is capable of moving in

the directions of either progress, or regress. This is
a cyclical process. For example, there was the great
culture of antiquity, after which what we call the
medieval Dark Ages rolled in. Then, mankind came
to its senses and the epoch of the Renaissance arrived,
followed by the brilliant period of the Enlightenment.
The best era in human history was the 19th century,
after which came the horrific 20th century, in which
we grew up and were educated. Thus, we have before
us a certain cyclicity, from which perhaps it follows
that, after our time, an era in which there is an acute
decline of culture, of intellectual and artistic culture,
followed by daily-life culture, there will come a time
in which culture flowers once again. Perhaps this is a
lawful phenomenon, related to time. Or, perhaps, we
are approaching the goal first formulated by Alexander V.A. Pyetsukh
Ivanovich Herzen, who said that the ultimate goal of is a winner of
history is the bourgeois philistine. That may well be so. the Pushkin
Prize for Overall
Contribution to the
L: Probably there are still readers left in provincial National Culture
Russia, which is more conservative than the population (2007). His books
of our megalopolises? More people in the cities use the include The Tsentr-
Yermolayevo War,
Internet and watch television, which takes them away Rommat, Village
from reading… Diaries, The Life of
Remarkable People,
P: The percentage of readers is likely the same as in Profile, A Lower
Genre and others
the city. Not more, not less.

L: So, are you a pessimist in how you look at

culture?

P: No, I am a realist. There is a wonderful library

here, where people know me, and they read me.
Much of the population is quite upper-echelon, at a
district level. Take our government officials. They are
quite well-read people. And we had shepherds here
who, if their houses were burglarized in the winter,
the thieves would take bound sets of thick journals3,
among other things. So, I think that the city and the
country are evenly matched. When they were filming a
documentary here called «Read Pyetsukh,” the director
did an experiment. During the town holiday, he put
some questions to children here: “Who was Lenin?”
They answered: “A writer.” “And who was Gogol?”
That question they couldn’t answer. He didn’t pre-
select the interviewees. He asked everybody. A small

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 LIBRARY OF IDEAS
town in a rural district. Kids in a small district town.
It has two schools, where the senior students would
seem to be fairly intelligent youngsters. At first glance.
I’ve given talks at these schools a few times, but maybe
their apparent intelligence comes down to the fact that
they mainly don’t say anything? In any case, they never
have any questions. They don’t have any questions, and
“In brief, the people of a town with ancient cultural traditions … had
sunk so low, that they read with loathing even what was written on
labels and matchboxes.”
they don’t have any answers, either. I think that the
countryside is very little different from the city now.
Neither worse, nor better. I don’t even know how to
explain this. It’s like the Russian saying: «Ves narod
iz odnikh vorot” – «All the people came through the
same gate.» What ails the city, ails the village as well.
In that sense, our nation has been united, in some way,
around the tragedy we are now experiencing. Namely,
the decline of culture in every aspect.
“The main secret of the Russian people is that we are unable to feed
ourselves. Russia has existed as a state for a thousand years and more,
but under the Ryurik Dynasty we lived on wild grasses every third year,
then harvest failures pursued us for three hundred years under the
Romanovs, during the Bolshevik dictatorship Russians survived from
hand to mouth, and now freedom of speech has made no impact on
grain crop germination.”
L. But what was the meaning of A.I. Herzen’s remark
that the Russian peasant is the man of the future? That
is the question you pose to Herzen, conversing with him
in your imagined dialogue, in Village Diaries.
P: Herzen was simply talking about the phenomenon
of the Russian peasant commune. He was talking about
the peasant as a social phenomenon, an economic
unit. For example, A.N. Engelgardt found the Russian
peasant in a condition of being unable to understand
a sentence, if it contained more than ten words. And
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one had to be a zealot for goodness, like Alexander
Ivanovich, to elevate the Russian peasant to man of
the future. We all know that Gogol said: Pushkin is
the Russian man of 200 years from now. Two-hundred
years have passed; they have just now ended…
L: The name of our journal is Noosphere. In the
1930s, V.I. Vernadsky wrote in “Scientific Thought as
Planetary Phenomenon,” that “mankind, taken as a
whole, is becoming a powerful geological force. And
mankind, its thought and labor, is faced with the
challenge of reconstructing the biosphere in the interests
of free-thinking humanity as a unified whole. This is a
new state of the biosphere, which we are approaching
without being aware of it, and this is the ‘noosphere’.”
It is quite clear that Vernadsky did not perceive any
threat from human activity, if man were to transform
the planet with his thought. It is a fairly optimistic view
of the history of human development and scientific and
technological progress. What do you think?
P: Vladimir Ivanovich did not pay attention to
the fact that scientific and technological progress
and the progress of the humane quality within man
are developing in different directions. The vectors
are completely different. They have virtually no
interface. None! More than that: the better machines
are, the worse people become, paradoxical as that may
seem… In general, I have no sympathy for science,
for the simple reason that it has been demonstrated in
practice that science is one thing, and man is another.
The successes of scientific and technological progress
do not make man either worse or better. All idealists
commit this sin, just as the Bolsheviks erred. I consider
them idealists to the highest degree – unlike most of
our contemporaries, who see them as simply bandits
and adventurers – people who thought that all it would
take was to free man from involuntary labor through
science (through science, I stress!), and man would
immediately become just about perfect. By the way,
most of our Bolsheviks were not readers. They did
not know Russian proverbs and they most decidedly
did not read Russian literature. And if they had read
it, then they certainly would have stumbled upon
the brilliant observation made by Vasili Sleptsov
(a seventh-rate writer, maybe you know) in a letter
to a friend: “German science is what it is, but don’t

you think it’s the case that socialism could be built
only in a nation where cherry trees are planted right
along the roads, but cherries make it to market.» This
was difficult to even grasp, until practical experience
showed us that the opposite is the case: socioeconomic
reforms are one thing, but human nature is something
entirely different. And the role of man as a component
of the phenomenon we call the noosphere is dubious,
in any event. And it absolutely does not depend on his
creative or destructive work.
L: V.I. Vernadsky and N.F. Fyodorov put forward
their ideas, proceeding not from the nature of, say,
Russian people, but rather from their own notions of
what man should be. Vernadsky’s idea about entering
the noosphere was like that. It so happens that science
advances, but not always on a pathway leading to
improvements.
P: Probably the goal of science, at least the
humanities, as distinct from the natural and exact
sciences, is not truth, not seeking for truth as in a
process, and even not enlightenment, but education.
The humanities, perhaps not even wishing to do so, set
themselves the goal of educating man. After all, why
don’t we slaughter each other over a pack of cigarettes,
and even the great majority of us? Because in our
childhood and adolescence we read Chekhov, and we
heard about Nikolai Fyodorov’s theory, and we know
who Vernadsky is.
If we take fields like the natural and exact sciences,
however, they don’t know what they’re doing. They
try to satisfy their personal curiosity, nothing more.
The only source of scientific searching is to satisfy
one’s personal curiosity. And perhaps they are simply
incapable of thinking through the consequences, since
you rarely will find a fool among the great scholars
in these two areas. Take, say, applied mathematics
or applied physics. The television and the computer
were invented. And where did that get us? We got the
dumbing down of the species, the dumbing down of
people. Soon they will simply unlearn how to read,
or count, or write. Why should they do those things?
At the push of a button, the computer will count for
you, and read, and write. It will do everything for you.
Elementary human skills, developed over millennia,
threaten to be wiped out…
The Noosphere
L: And how do you think the new system of
evaluating learning, I mean the EGE [Standardized
State Testing], is affecting, for example, learning of the
Russian language? Because now schoolchildren are not
so much studying Russian, as learning how to answer
test questions...
P: Perhaps, by doing this, society is playing to
people’s capabilities? They have fallen off steeply.
What’s going on is not even so much “dumbing down,”
as an out-and-out devolution of man. And this process
moves more rapidly than evolution.
L: Do you think that the process of devolution has
already become inevitable?
P: Inevitable and catastrophic, if we forget about
the function of the individual. Incidentally, this may
even be a worldwide phenomenon. Maybe we’re not
the only unlucky ones. We may even be lagging a little
behind the rest of the world, not counting the East, in
our decline. It cannot be excluded that mankind as a
whole is doomed to extinction. In any event, there are
many indications of that.
“Never mind that the wheelbarrow, invented by the great humanist
Blaise Pascal, was later used by our tyrants in Kolyma, or that the
achievements of theoretical physics have held the world in a state of
panicky terror for fifty years. Science and technological progress from
their inception had nothing in common with enlightenment, that is, with
the education of man as a higher being.”
L: Is this phenomenon caused by people moving to
megalopolises?
P: Yes, in part. But that supposition neither explains
nor resolves the phenomenon. The steep decline in the
size of the population, the steep decline of the birth
rate. The incredible aging of the population.
But, like any artist, I do not lose hope that the
Russian God is great, and that perhaps something
metaphysical, something supernatural will happen
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 LIBRARY OF IDEAS
to lead our people and our country out of this grave
situation.
L: In 1993, Academician N.N. Moiseyev wrote that
megalopolises are monsters, in which one has to learn to
live. As a city man and man of letters, who has settled
in the Tver countryside, what do you think about life in
megalopolises?
P: Rural life, of course, is a good deal healthier
than urban life. It means fresh food, lack of stress,
and splendid air. And a person is supported by the
work here. I got up at 6:00 a.m. and wrote until 11:00.
Then I have breakfast, then I go to the farmstead and
cultivate the land until 7:00 p.m., then I sit with my
neighbors – we have literary readings. There are 27
Moscow intelligentsia households in the village. I
think we should expect people to migrate back from
megalopolises to the countryside. In general, this trend
of leaving the megalopolises may not yet be at hand,
but it can be forecast as better. Back to the land. You
get so spoiled here, that when you return to Moscow,
at first you feel out of your element.
L: Vyacheslav Alexeyevich, we learned that you
have been invited to teach the Russian language in a
business setting. What are these courses like and how do
they help the people who attend them?
P: I gave such a seminar at a business school. I detest
that word.4 Let’s say, “a school of entrepreneurship.”
I worked on Russian with young businessmen. I
tried to explain to them, and to demonstrate, that it
is inconceivable for anything to be done, anything
serious or positive, without a certain level of culture.
The only power which is capable of shaping a cultured
person under Russian conditions – by generally simple
means, nothing fancy – is perfect knowledge of the
Russian language. There’s something of a mystery to
this: how can mastery of one’s native language affect
a person’s cultural makeup? Maybe it’s that Russian
is, of course, a very complex language. Perhaps the
transformation occurs through this extraordinary
complexity, the intricacy, the flourishes and the
metaphysics of the Russian language. So, that’s the
philosophy behind our classes. If you want to go into
business and make money, you need to be serious,
54
cultured people. If you want to be serious, cultured
people, you need to know the Russian language to
perfection. It is the most powerful educational force
there is. That’s what we had in mind.
L: So the “devolution from Gogol to macaque” has
not progressed too far, if people are striving to learn
good Russian?
P: These are people in their thirties, our children.
When we’re talking about really apocalyptic things,
we more likely have our grandchildren in mind. The
children, however, are still fairly close to us. They were
shaped back when they still had Pushkin read to them
as children.
You see, Tolstoy said that you can’t do anything,
since you can’t do everything. You can’t do everything,
but something has to be done. You can’t simply watch
the process of decline, the flickering out of a nation.
No matter what, you have to do something. Maybe
it means making some superhuman efforts not to
allow outside forces to break the precious golden
thread, connecting the culture of our own and future
generations. For example, I also hold seminars at the
All-Russian Young Writers Forum, which takes place
each autumn outside Moscow. And there I work with
young writers. After all, it’s as if there were no such
profession. Well, there is no such profession – the
profession of being a writer. But there is a certain
variety of insanity or charitable activity. Insanity – it’s
clear why. There’s a chance in this country to pick up
money which is just lying there at your feet – to stab,
rob or defraud, and these people are missing all these
opportunities. They’re writing!
L: Is the yen to be a writer really so surprising? You
yourself have said that themes to write about are just
lying on the ground in Russia.
“… In the middle of the 19th century, people
did not yet understand that literature was the main
manufacture in Rus, and that we were only secondarily
an agrarian nation, but primarily a country in which
one could produce exclusively prose, essays and
verses.”
P: It is understandable why we were intoxicated
by this. But why they are intoxicated is beyond
The Noosphere

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comprehension. In any event, when I work with them,
the leitmotif of all our meetings is that literature,
of whatever sort it might be, is also a very potent
protective, defensive casing. The main task of literature
is to prevent that golden thread from being broken.
That is the objective. Others might have thrown up
their hands a long time ago. You already feel like a
“… People in the 19th century insisted on connecting the notion of
a better future for mankind precisely with the successes of science,
primarily in the area of technology. And therefore it seemed that as soon
as a dozen or so fantastical machines were invented, which would mark
the triumph of human intelligence, then a fifth Gospel would appear and
resolve all problems; an era of prosperity would dawn, and evil would
dissipate everywhere, because just look how things are: they’ve already
invented the internal combustion engine, but you can still be knifed for
a five-kopeck piece…”
foreigner in this country, because you understand
your infinite solitude and a sense of being completely
unneeded. Somebody else might have just dropped
all this nonsense, and ultimately taken up something
different, but there’s some kind of worm which goes
to work in your head, and makes you get up each
morning and go into your study and assemble words
into complex sentences.
L: You had a new tale published last year in issue #3 of
October magazine. The plot was connected with Nikolai
Fyodorovich Fyodorov’s idea about the resurrection
of the dead, and with his work The Philosophy of the
Common Cause.
P: Yes, it was a little tale. It’s called “It All Starts
Over” It came out as a book in 2008 from the Enas
publishing house. The plot of the story involves an
attempt by some relatively young people, from the
generation of our sons, to implement Fyodorov’s
idea technically. There are some almost real persons
among the characters in the book, such as the son of
the famous Peterson, a close collaborator of Fyodorov.
In the plot of this tale, his father has passed on to him
certain technical ideas.
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L: It is amazing to read N. Fyodorov’s book in our
time. After the revolution, many cemeteries fell into
disrepair. The ashes of well-known people were carried
from one place to another. Thus these cemeteries, so to
speak, “became kin” to each other…
P: Do you know where Fyodorov himself is buried?
There is a graveyard church on Kalyayevskaya Street.
Where the Soyuzmultfilm studio is located. Behind it
is a large playing field, which used to be a cemetery.
The area is sealed under a many-centimeters-thick
layer of asphalt. Fyodorov lies at rest under that layer
of asphalt. Yes… For some reason fate decided to play
a joke on him.
L: How is F.’s idea implemented, technically, in your
story?
P: I skirted around this point very delicately:
Peterson brings in some kind of machine, which is
capable, if even a single atom of a deceased person, or
some personal item of his, is submitted to it, to attract
all the other atoms out of the infinite Universe, like a
magnet. All the rest of the atoms are pulled in by that
one single atom. In the case in point, it is a glove which
belonged to the Emperor Paul I. I fictionalized this to
the point of impossibility, trying to avoid the technical
details. In general, that entire philosophy is pure God-
seeking.6 But Vernadsky ended up with God-seeking,
because his doctrine of the noosphere is a doctrine of a
hypostasis of God. The noosphere is unquestionably a
hypostasis of God.
It has to be interpreted as a metaphysical unification
of the forces of man and the forces of nature. And why
not? And then that will be a hypostasis of God. It is
also an unbreakable vault of some kind of natural and
supernatural laws, human laws. However you want
to put it. That is a completely boundless topic, and a
completely separate one.
L: In 1943 V.I. Vernadsky, replying to Stalin’s
congratulations to him on his 80th birthday, thought he
needed to announce that the process of transformation of
the Earth’s biosphere into the noosphere was inevitable.
Stalin replied to the telegram, but said not a word
about the noosphere. Then Vernadsky wrote his article,
 The Noosphere

“A Few Words about the Noosphere,” which he sent to
the newspaper Pravda and to Stalin personally. Stalin
did not reply, and Pravda did not print the article.
Almost 70 years later, have we entered the noosphere?
P: I don’t know why Vernadsky believed that
the noosphere would always be a plus. Maybe the
noosphere is a given, objective reality, but oriented in
the minus direction.
This is God-building,7 pure and simple.
“Russians are generally the happiest of mortals, since
for them a dream is also reality, only of a different sort,
and they are capable of constructing for themselves a
tolerable reality by the force of imagination alone…”
L: You have written: “Russians are generally the
happiest of mortals, since for them a dream is also
reality, only of a different sort, and they are capable
of constructing for themselves a tolerable reality by
the force of imagination alone…” Are Russian people
idealists? What is idealism?
P: I don’t find any particular difference between
idealism and materialism. In my view, idealism is
materialism, as assimilated by romantics. That’s all.
***
The interview was over. Vyacheslav Pyetsukh, the
traditional avant-gardist with an ironical outlook on
life, settled down on his porch and turned on some
recordings of Guy Béart, old French ballads, and started
singing along. In flawless French, it should be said.
With marvelous pronunciation, perhaps unusual for
the Zubtsov District. “Brave marin revient de guerre
– tout doux” – “A gallant sailor returned from war…”
Maybe Pyetsukh is right, and Russians really are the
happiest of mortals? And maybe he is right, that “our
literature is first in the world. That, too, we may say
comes out of grief, for the Russian writer was unable
for 300 years to ‘appeal his taxes’ or ‘hinder tsars from
fighting each other,’ and he was forced to acquire a
taste for undergoing operations on his soul.» All in all,
it is helpful in dealing with various troubles, to think
that somewhere in the Tver countryside there lives the
Russian writer Vyacheslav Pyetsukh, and that “the tilt
of the convolutions of his cerebral cortex and a special
tuning of his soul” still cause him to write. Lines like
this, for example:
“The air was still light, but it was thickening in a
certain way, and the western sky was stained in cardinal
hues, in purple and raspberry, to be precise; evidently
tomorrow’s weather would take a turn for the worse. A
half-rotted shed of uncertain purpose was clearly visible,
along with a stand of birches, stripped about half-way
up by the cows, and a cowshed with a collapsed roof and
a piece of a metal spiral staircase, which had made its
way who knows how to our Tver Region backwater. No,
indeed, Russia is a sick child in the family of nations,
but that is why you love Russia as you love nothing else,
to the point of bewilderment and longing.»
Read Pyetsukh, people! 

1
The Russian writer Gogol’s surname is the name of a type of duck. – Translator’s note.
2
“Glupov,” the city of “Stupid,” is the scene of Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin’s History of One Town. – Tr.
3
“Thick journals” are traditional Russian literary periodicals. – Tr.
4
Russian biznes is borrowed directly from English. – Tr.
5
Rus was the name of the Eastern Slav civilization, centered in Kiev (Kievan Rus) in the 9th to 13th centuries. The term may be
used to denote the several successors to that society, with an emphasis on their cultural roots. – Tr.
6
Bogoiskatelstvo, or God-seeking, was a Russian philosophical and religious movement in the first decade of the 20th century,
which was particularly strong among St. Petersburg intellectuals. – Tr.
7
Bogostroitelstvo, or God-building, was another early-20th century St. Petersburg-centered intellectual movement, in which the
writer Maxim Gorky and future Bolshevik Commissar Anatoli Lunacharsky were involved. Its representatives addressed Marx’s
dictum on the mission not merely to explain the world, but to “change it,” in quasi-religious terms. – Tr.

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