The Buddha's Return

A millionaire is killed. A golden statuette of a Buddha goes missing. A penniless student, who is afflicted by dream-like fits, is arrested and accused of murder.

In typically crisp, unfussy prose, Gazdanov's delicately balanced novel is an irresistibly hypnotic masterpiece from one of Russia's most talented émigré writers. Slipping between the menacing dream world of the student's fevered imagination, and the dark back alleys of the Paris underworld, The Buddha Returns is part detective novel, part philosophical thriller, and part love story.

"[A] deliciously dark and complex tale concerning mistaken identities, moral ambiguities and deep-set yearnings. . . fresh and exciting . . . the protagonist’s metaphysical pondering and recurring mental fogs are curiously gripping, and his wistful reminiscences of old flame Catherine turn the novel into a sensual as well as a cerebral affair." — The Minneapolis Star Tribune

"This is an excellent novel by any standard, and especially remarkable for joining the philosophical underpinnings of the Russians with the intrigue of a French thriller." — Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

"Eccentric... exciting... an offbeat appeal and flashes of black humour." — Eileen Battersby, Irish Times

"The Gazdanov revival… is nothing short of a literary event… comparisons to Lermontov, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Proust, Celine and Camus… are entirely apt: few authors are able so seamlessly to wed the styles and thematic concerns of the great Russian psychological novelists with those of the French modernists and existentialists… Gazdanov’s thrillers offer a truly original vision, distinguished by profound existential and metaphysical concerns, a peculiar sense of humour, and enchanting prose, which Bryan Karetnyk has once again reproduced with impeccable grace." — Boris Dralyuk, The Times Literary Supplement (UK)

"While Gazdanov seems in thrall to these vastly different novelists, he has his own utterly distinctive voice... vivid sensory detail... transcends the mid-20th-century émigré tradition, and poses prescient questions about the fracturing of identity... deftly translated... Pushkin Press is to be congratulated on reviving an author who is as relevant now as ever. Both these fine novels [The Spectre of Alexander Wolf and The Buddha's Return] offer gripping detective drama, while also engaging with questions of consciousness and self that cannot be resolved by simply foiling a killer." — The Spectator (UK)

Gaito Gazdanov (Georgi Ivanovich Gazdanov, 1903-1971) was the son of a forester. Born in St Petersburg and brought up in Siberia and Ukraine, he joined Baron Wrangel's White Army in 1919 aged just sixteen, and fought in the Russian Civil War until the Army's evacuation from the Krimea in 1920. After a brief sojourn in Gallipoli and Contantinople (where he completed secondary school), he moved to Paris, where he spent eight years variously working as a docker, washing locomotives, and in the Citroën factory. During periods of unemployment, he slept on park benches or in the Métro. In 1928, he became a taxi driver, working nights, which enabled him to write and to attend lectures at the Sorbonne during the day. His first stories began appearing in 1926, in Russian émigré periodicals, and he soon became part of the literary scene. In 1929 he published An Evening with Claire, which was acclaimed by, among others, Maxim Gorki and the great critic Vladislav Khodasevich. He died in Munich in 1971, and is buried in the Russian cemetery of Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois near Paris.I died. I have searched long and hard for the right words to describe what happened, and, convinced that none of the usual, familiar terms will do, have finally settled on one associated with what seems the least imprecise of realms: death. I died in the month of June, at night, during one of my first years abroad. This, however, was far less remarkable than my being the only person to know of this death, the only one to have witnessed it. I saw myself in the mountains; with that absurd invariable sense of urgency characteristic of events in which personal considerations for some reason cease to play any part, I found myself having to scale a high cliff with a sheer drop. Here and there little thorn-bushes somehow managed to cut through the brownish-grey rock surface; in places there were even dead tree trunks and roots creeping along rugged perpendicular clefts. Below, where I had begun my ascent, there was a low stone ledge skirting around the cliff, and lower still, in the dark abyss, was the distant muffled rumble of a mountain river. At length I climbed up, carefully groping for cavities in the stone and clinging now to a bush, now to the root of a tree, now to a jagged rock jutting out of the cliff face. I was slowly nearing a small shelf that had been obscured from below, but from which I somehow knew a narrow path led away; I couldn’t shake off the oppressive and incomprehensible—like everything else that was going on—presentiment that I was destined nevermore to see it or to follow those narrow bends as it spiralled up unevenly, strewn with pine needles. Later, I remembered that I had sensed someone waiting for me up there, someone’s keen, impatient desire to see me. I had at last almost reached the top; with my right hand I grabbed onto a sizeable stone ledge and in another few seconds I might have managed to pull myself up, when suddenly the solid granite crumbled beneath my fingers and I began to fall headlong, my body hitting the cliff face as the latter seemed to be soaring upwards before my eyes. Then came a sharp, almighty jolt that winded me and made the muscles in my arms ache—I was suspended in mid-air, my numb fingers clinging convulsively to the dried-out branch of a dead tree that had once nestled in a horizontal crevice in the rock. Below me was a void. I dangled there, my wide eyes transfixed by the patch of granite in my field of vision, as I sensed the branch steadily yielding beneath my weight. A small transparent lizard flashed for an instant a little above my fingers, and I distinctly saw its head, its flanks rising and falling rapidly, and its deathly gaze—cold and unmoving—a reptile’s gaze. Then in one agile, elusive movement it darted upwards, vanishing. Shortly thereafter I heard the intense buzzing of a bumblebee, rising and falling in pitch, although not without a certain insistent melodiousness and something containing a vague acoustic memory, which I expected to crystallize at any moment. But the branch gave more and more under my fingers, and the terror penetrated deeper and deeper inside me. Least of all did this terror lend itself to description; what prevailed was an understanding that these were the final moments of my life, that no power on earth could save me, that I was alone, utterly alone, and that beneath me in those abysmal depths, which I could sense with every sinew of my body, death awaited me, and I was powerless against it. Never before had it occurred to me that these feelings—loneliness and terror—could be experienced not only mentally, but literally with every fibre of one’s being. And although I was still alive and there was not a single scratch on my body, I was, at a phenomenal speed, which nothing could halt or even slow, undergoing such mental agony, such chilling languor and insurmountable anguish. Only at the very last second, or even fraction of a second, did I feel something like sweet sacrilegious exhaustion, curiously inseparable from the languor and anguish. It seemed to me that if I were to combine into a single entity every sensation I had experienced over the course of my life, the collective power of these would still pale in comparison with what I had experienced in these past few minutes. But this was my final thought: there was a snap, the branch broke, and around me the rocks, bushes and ledges began spinning with such unbearable speed, until finally, after an eternity, amid the humid air there came the heavy crunch of my plummeting body hitting the rocks on the riverbank. A moment later I watched helplessly as the image of the sheer cliff and the mountain river disappeared before my eyes; then it was gone, and nothing remained.

Such was my recollection of death, after which I mysteriously continued to survive, if I am to assume that I did in fact remain myself. Prior to this, as with the majority of people, I had often dreamt that I was falling, but each time I had awoken during the fall. Yet as I made this arduous ascent to the top of the cliff, and when I met the cold gaze of the lizard, and when the branch broke beneath my fingers, I realized that I was not asleep. I have to say that throughout this vivid and frankly banal incident, devoid as it was entirely of any romantic or chimeric nuances, there were two people present—a witness and a victim. This duality, however, was barely noticeable, at times imperceptible. And so, having returned from oblivion, I once again found myself in the world where until now I had led such a notional existence; it was not that the world around me had changed all of a sudden, but rather that I couldn’t tell, amid the disorderly and random chaos of memories, unfounded concerns, contradictory emotions, sensations, odours and sights, what it was that demarcated my own existence, what belonged to me and what to others, and what was the illusive significance of that unstable compound of various elements, the absurd amalgam of which was theoretically supposed to constitute my being, imparting to me my name, nationality, date and place of birth, my personal history, which is to say that long sequence of failures, accidents and transformations. I felt as though I were slowly re-emerging, in the very place where I was never supposed to return—having forgotten everything that had taken place before now. But this wasn’t amnesia in the literal sense of the word: I had just forgotten irrevocably what one was supposed to consider important, and what insignificant.

I could now sense the strange illusoriness of my own life everywhere—an illusoriness that was many-layered and inescapable, irrespective of whether it had to do with projects, plans or the immediate material conditions of life, all of which had the ability to change entirely over the course of a few days or a few hours. In any case, I had been acquainted with this state for some time; it was one of the things I hadn’t forgotten. For me, the world consisted of objects and sensations that I recognized—as if I had experienced them long ago and only now were they coming back to me, like a dream lost in time. This had even been the case when I encountered them probably for the very first time in my life. It seemed as if, amid an enormous, chaotic combination of vastly disparate things, I had blindly sought the path I had trod before, without knowing how or where. Perhaps this is why the majority of events left me entirely indifferent and only a rare few moments containing—or seeming to contain—some sort of coincidence arrested my attention with incredible force. It would be difficult for me to pinpoint how exactly these moments differed from others—some inexplicable nuance, some random detail that was plain for me to see. They almost never influenced my own fate or personal interests directly; they were visions that usually appeared out of the blue. There had been years when my life somehow clearly didn’t belong to me, and I took only an external, insignifcant role in its events: I was entirely indifferent to what went on around me, despite there having been tempestuous events, sometimes involving mortal danger. But I understood this danger only theoretically, and I could never fully appreciate its true meaning, which would probably have struck terror in my soul and compelled me to live other than I did. It often seemed to me—when I was alone and there was no one to prevent me from immersing myself in this endless series of vague sensations, visions and thoughts—that I lacked the strength for one last push, in order to discover myself and suddenly to comprehend at long last the hidden meaning of my destiny, which had until now been going through my memory like some haphazard relay of random occurrences. But I never managed to do this, nor even did I manage to comprehend why one thing or another, on the face of it bearing no relation to me whatsoever, would suddenly take on such a significance that was as incomprehensible as it was plainly apparent.

Now began a new phase in my life. A whole series of oddly powerful sensations, many of which I had never before experienced, passed through my very being: unbearable thirst and the heat of the desert, the icy waves of a northern sea that surrounded me and in which I would spend hours swimming towards a far-distant rocky shore, the burning touch of a swarthy female body that I had never known. Often I endured tortuous physical pain symptomatic of incurable diseases whose descriptions I would later find in medical textbooks—diseases from which I never suffered. I had gone blind more than once, I had been left crippled many times over, and one of the rare physical pleasures known to me was that of regaining consciousness and realizing that I was in the fullest of health and that due to some incomprehensible collusion of events I was now beyond these excruciating states of sickness or injury.

Of course, it was far from always the case that I had to endure such things. What had now become utterly immutable was a peculiarity owing to which I felt almost like a stranger to myself. Whenever I found myself alone, I would be engulfed instantly by the troubled movements of a vast, imaginary world; it would hurtle me along uncontrollably and I would scarcely be able to keep pace with it. There was visual and auditory chaos, comprised of an array of disparate elements; sometimes it would be the music of a distant march, ensconced on all sides by high stone walls; sometimes it was the silent motion of an endless green landscape, broken only by the rolling hills and their strange undulation; sometimes it was the outlying environs of a Dutch town with stone troughs of uncertain origin, where the water trickled with a steady murmur—to intensify this obvious infringement of Dutch realism, women would go to them, one after another, carrying jugs on their heads. Nowhere was there any logical pattern in this, and the shifting chaos clearly failed to present even a remote semblance of any harmonious order. And so, accordingly, at that point in my life, which was marked by the constant attendance of chaos, my inner existence acquired an equally false and wavering character. I could never be certain how long any one feeling would last, I never knew what would come to replace it the very next day or in a week’s time. And just as I had been amazed to learn upon reading my first books, after having mastered the alphabet, that the people there managed to speak in full sentences, using classical constructions of subject and predicate with a full stop at the end—although it seemed to me that no one ever did this in reality—so too it now appeared almost inconceivable to me that one person or another could be an accountant or a minister, a labourer or a bishop, and remain firmly convinced that his work was more important and enduring than anything else, as if a bishop’s cassock or a labourer’s jacket mysteriously but exactly corresponded to the personal calling and vocation of the man who wore it. I knew, of course, that within a given timeframe and under normal circumstances a labourer would never become a bishop, just as a bishop would not turn into a labourer, and often this state of affairs would last until death set them equal with grim indifference. Yet I also sensed that the world in which the former was fated to be this, and the latter that, could suddenly turn out to be notional and illusory, and that everything could alter beyond recognition. In other words, the forum in which my life unfolded was for me devoid of any clearly defined and in any way concrete features; there was nothing constant about it—the objects and ideas that comprised it could change in form and content, like the impossible metamorphoses of a never-ending dream. And each morning, upon waking, I would gaze with troubled wonderment at the wallpaper patterns in my hotel room, which always seemed different from the night before, because so many changes had occurred between yesterday and today, and I knew instinctively that I too might have changed, swept up by that imperceptible and irresistible motion. I seemed to be living in an almost abstract world, never quite managing to uncover the logic behind certain objects and concepts that had seemed so crucial and definitive to a number of my former teachers, a sort of fundamental law of all evolution and human existence.