The Man Who Stayed the Course

Carnival festivities and the comic spectacles and ritual connected with them had an important place in the life of medieval man . . . They were sharply distinct from the serious official, ecclesiastical, feudal, and political cult forms and ceremonials. They offered a completely different, nonofficial, extra-ecclesiastical, and extra-political aspect of the world, of man, and of human rela tions; they built a second world and a second life outside officialdom. . . .

With this quotation from Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World, Leonid Plyushch opens the remarkable story of his life, a life so tragic, so heroic, and, finally, so alien to us, that the reader begins to wonder at times if it hasn’t been lived in another galaxy. Born into a proletarian family on the eve of the Second World War, Plyushch lost his father early in the conflict. He and his mother and sister endured poverty and hunger, avoiding starvation by living on “beet soup for half a year.” A years- long bout with tuberculosis—eventually cured at a sanatorium as grim as any Dickensian orphanage—left him with a medical record that prevented him, despite his fervent protests, from qualifying for the KGB.

JA

About the Author

Joseph A. Rehyansky

Carnival festivities and the comic spectacles and ritual connected with them had an important place in the life of medieval man . . . They were sharply distinct from the serious official, ecclesiastical, feudal, and political cult forms and ceremonials. They offered a completely different, nonofficial, extra-ecclesiastical, and extra-political aspect of the world, of man, and of human rela tions; they built a second world and a second life outside officialdom. . . .

With this quotation from Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World, Leonid Plyushch opens the remarkable story of his life, a life so tragic, so heroic, and, finally, so alien to us, that the reader begins to wonder at times if it hasn’t been lived in another galaxy. Born into a proletarian family on the eve of the Second World War, Plyushch lost his father early in the conflict. He and his mother and sister endured poverty and hunger, avoiding starvation by living on “beet soup for half a year.” A years- long bout with tuberculosis—eventually cured at a sanatorium as grim as any Dickensian orphanage—left him with a medical record that prevented him, despite his fervent protests, from qualifying for the KGB.