Perumbadavam still remembers the moment his pen connected with paper to write Oru Sankeerthanam Pole , all feverish and fearful, leaning over his solitary desk. Carried in a tide of creative luminance, he felt a ‘strange epiphany’ that sucked his soul into a whirlwind of pain and exuberance. He had no control over the process or the agony it evoked, as he fell deeper and deeper into its mysterious recess. “My mind was like a forest withering in wildfire,” says the author.
Perumbadavam had his first taste of the master storyteller at a much younger age, ‘like many other Malayalis who were drawn to Russian classics’. “I first read Crime and Punishment as a 16-year-old and ever since I have been possessed by the author and his literary genius. I started devouring his books with an appetite that was both frightening and overwhelming. I exhausted his novels and short stories and moved on to biographies and studies. But that time, I never thought I would pen a book on my idol,” he says.
Perumbadavam calls Dostoyevsky a prophet, the ultimate wordsmith who made him feel man’s inner turmoil in all its excruciating rawness. Perumbadavam says he was ever-fascinated with Dostoyevsky’s characters, real-life prototypes caught in the mire of existence. “But eventually I found the author more intriguing. Gambling, epilepsy, debts, alcoholism, poverty — his life was incredibly complex and dramatic. Staying in that seismic zone of uncertainty, he took you into the innermost corners of human mind, digging out deep buried fears and desires,” he says.
Intense and exhausting
But as he entered the forlorn realms of Dostoyevsky’s heart, it turned out to be an intense and exhausting affair. “ It was a world of volcanic eruptions and tidal waves, thunderstorms and chilly silence. He was an author who erected a fictional universe seething with truth and polyphony, an artist who revelled in his spiritual angst. While most of his contemporaries wrote about human misery stationed in the middle of all luxuries, his life has been an everlasting struggle,” he says.
Oru Sankeerthanam Pole is all about Dostoyevsky’s stormy romance with Anna Snitkina, the way their affair evolves into an everlasting hymn of love. It was the kind of love fraught with rapture and confusion, torture and bliss. “She enters his life as an assistant, helping him write ‘The Gambler’ in long hand. As the work progresses, both start experiencing the sharp pangs of love,” he says. Initially they are the deity and devotee, but often the roles are reversed. In the 21 days that he takes to complete the book, the author continues his fling with roulette tables and epileptic fits. But Anna is steadfast, and in one of the most resonant closing lines in Malayalam fiction, Dostoyevsky’s much younger stenographer calls herself his wife. “The book heavily draws from Anna’s memoirs, the time she spent with her master-turned-husband,” says Perumbadavam about the real-life story that inspired his masterpiece.
Perumbadavam adds that those days he lived in the perennial fear of attempting something beyond his competence. “I consider Brothers Karamazov my Bible and the man who wrote it no less than a God. Despite being a wounded soul, a wanderer in search of mutually exclusive things, he considered human relationships divine and believed in the sanctity of love. I knew I could never measure up to the extent of his melancholy or the enormity of his passion. I was all prepared for the failure and frustration,” he says. He described Dostoyevsky as an author who bore God’s signature over his heart, a phrase much celebrated in Malayalam. “I consider it a miracle, a thought that descended on my pen during the most divine moments of my creative life. Normally I won’t be able to imagine something so profound and brilliant.”
He wrote the book as an unalloyed Keralite, conjuring up the streets and edifices of St. Petersburg in his writing room in Perumbadavam. But the author was in for a huge surprise when he first visited the land of Dostoyevsky to shoot a docufiction , “I saw everything I imagined coming alive around me. Dostoyevsky's home, the street he walked every day and the shores of the Neva river were all the same. It was one of the happiest moments of my life.” Perumbadavam says he could almost sense the presence of Dostoyevsky while in Russia, “while walking through the pavements I felt he was holding my hand and guiding me through the pages of his life,” he adds.
The 75th edition of Oru Sankeerthanam Pole was released at the Dostoyevsky memorial in St. Petersburg and a copy of the book is kept at the museum there. Seeing his work among the manuscripts, portraits and personal belongings of his beloved author was a proud moment in his life. “It was my requiem for him, something that fills me with immense pleasure and pride each time I think about it,” he winds up.
