The Provincial Metaphysician: A Novel

Very large format edition. "The Provincial Metaphysician" is a historical, political, and philosophical novel set in Russia between 1913 and 1924. It tells the story of Mikhail Andreyevich Vedenin, a provincial schoolteacher who publishes at his own expense a vast metaphysical system entitled "On Reciprocal Being and the Forms of Historical Necessity." Almost no one reads it. The book disappears into silence, debt, and provincial obscurity. Then the old order collapses. After the revolutions of 1917, Bolshevik officials discover Vedenin's work and begin to interpret it as a prophetic explanation of the fall of the empire. Passages are extracted, shortened, rearranged, and adapted for workers, soldiers, teachers, and administrators. A doctrine called Vedeninism is gradually created around the author's name. What began as a complex philosophy of obligation, conscience, institutions, and historical pressure becomes a political language used to justify education, authority, requisition, discipline, and state power. At first, Mikhail experiences the recognition he had desired for years. His name appears in newspapers, lectures, programmes, posters, and official editions. He receives respect, food, warmth, medical care, and protection during civil war and famine. Yet every privilege increases his dependence upon the institutions transforming his thought. His objections are edited, reclassified, or described as the limitations of an isolated author unable to understand the mature meaning of his own doctrine. Around him, others struggle over the ownership of ideas. Sofia, his wife, sees private life converted into public mythology. Vera, a former pupil who rises within the new educational administration, tries to preserve an ethical core without losing the power to protect schools and teachers. Lunin turns philosophy into administrative method. Kruglova builds a doctrine more influential than the book from which it emerged. Ivan Basov witnesses its formulas used before grain searches in starving villages. Printer Grigory Falk secretly preserves the pages that official editions remove. >Author Roberto Minichini is an Italian writer, poet, and essayist, born in Mainz, Germany, in 1973 to an Italian father and a Croatian mother. He has lived in Italy since adolescence and is based in Gorizia. His work encompasses fiction, poetry, philosophy, history, spirituality, astrology, esotericism, and the comparative study of religions. He devotes particular attention to Russian, German, and Iranian culture, Islamic thought, Shi'i spirituality, mysticism, political history, and the relationship between ideas, institutions, power, memory, and individual responsibility. Writing in several languages, he combines historical research, philosophical reflection, and literary imagination.