Books: Life as a Trap

STRANGE LIFE OF IVAN OSOKIN (166 pp.)—P. D. Ouspensky—Home Press ($2.75).

If a man had his life to live over again, knowing what he knows now, would he make the same mistakes?

In the Strange Life of Ivan Osokin, a lucid little novel, the hero is given a chance to find out. The story opens at the Kursk station in Moscow on a bright April day in 1902. Osokin, a young man of 26, is seeing Zinaida and her mother off to the Crimea. Zinaida is piqued with Ivan because he will not go with her, but he is too poor to go and too stiff to tell her the reason. The train leaves; Ivan is left alone; he feels for a moment as if the event had happened before. In the next two months he gets three letters from Zinaida; then she stops writing. Soon he hears that she is going to be married.

Ivan goes to a magician, tells him biterly of all the chances he has thrown away in his life. If he had only known beforehand the outcome of his actions, he says, he would not be such a failure. The magician laughs and tells him that nothing would be changed. Then, to Ivan’s amazement, he offers to prove it by sending him back twelve years. He may relive his life, and may even remember at every stage—if he wants to—what the consequences will be.

The Wheel. Ivan wakes up in the dormitory at school, where he proceeds to misbehave and get expelled, just as he did before. He hurts his mother, just as he did before. What had been his past is now his future; he knows it but he cannot avoid it. He gets into the same scrapes, has the same adventures with women. By the time he again meets Zinaida he has forgotten that he ever met her. The story repeats itself down to the last detail—until, once again, he finds himself visiting the magician. But when he reaches the point of asking the magician to send him back, he suddenly remembers everything.

“But this is simply turning round on a wheel!” says Osokin. “It is a trap!”

The old man smiles.

“My dear friend,” he says, “this trap is called life. . . . You must realize that you yourself can change nothing and that you must seek help. . . . And to live with this realization means to sacrifice something big for it. … A man can be given only what he can use; and he can use only that for which he has sacrificed something. . . . This is the law of human nature.”

The view of life repeating itself on an endless “wheel” is a fundamental of Hindu belief. Westerners are apt to find it a hypothesis out of all proportion to the evidence: the occasional human sensation that “I have been here before.” A more common and much stronger sensation is that of free will, which the “wheel” denies. In Osokin’s tale, the magician’s demands resemble the Christian requisites for salvation.

The Author. Peter Demianovich Ouspensky died last month in England, at 69, in the private obscurity wherein he had always preferred darkly to shine. His London solicitor believed that Ouspensky was “the greatest man alive.” Sentiments like that of the solicitor were once held by various impressionable readers of A New Model of the Universe and Ouspensky’s earlier Tertium Organum, a massive work of esoteric philosophy that Ouspensky wrote in Russia before World War I and first published in English in the U.S. in 1920. Moscow-born Ouspensky was at that time living in Constantinople. The late Viscountess Rothermere, then in Washington, read Tertium Organum, got “passionately” interested in it, cabled-Ouspensky an offer to sponsor him in England.

For a few years in the ’20s, Ouspensky held hushed little meetings in London and vied with the more dazzling George Ivanovich Gurdjieff as a spellbinder to wandering intelligentsia. He had himself been a Gurdjieffean for a time, but the two mystics parted when Ouspensky began to think he should be more than just a disciple. Not as hypnotic personally as Gurdjieff, Ouspensky never made as great a splash in the U.S., which he visited as a lecturer in 1942. But his first and last novel will remain readable longer than Gurdjieff’s extant pronouncements, for Ouspensky knew how to write.