Alexei Parshchik: The Burning, Silent Cartographer of Time
Born on an overcast October morning in the Volga basin in 1932, Alexei Parshchik entered a world already trembling on the cusp of steel. The son of an arithmetician and a librarian—a dual heritage of precision and lyricism—Parshchik’s early years were marked by a spiritual hunger that did not fit comfortably within the dialectical materialism that governed Soviet intellectual life. While officially a hydrographer for most of his adult life, mapping desolate riverbeds and tundras, Parshchik quietly built a corpus of poetry and philosophical fragments that have remained largely obscure except among a cult following of East European philologists and exo-metaphysicians.
It was in 1958, while stationed near the confluence of the Lena and the Vitim rivers, that Parshchik began writing what he called his “aqua-gnostic cosmogony”—a blend of river hydraulics, theological lament, and metaphysical speculation. His collected writings, compiled posthumously in 1996 as “Карта Безвременья” (The Map of Atemporality), remain untranslated in their entirety, though several samizdat fragments have found their way into underground literary journals.^1
A man inclined to silence, Parshchik wrote, notably, not with ink but with graphite on repurposed ordinance maps, interweaving the hydraulic phenomenology of floodplains with meditations on the soul’s permeable boundaries. In one pivotal passage, he reflects: “Река — это не поток воды, а поток воли через тебя” (“A river is not a stream of water, but a current of will through you”).^2 This deceptively simple line continues to resonate through the catacombs of Russian mysticism, embodying a metaphysical movement where geography meets Gnosis. His verse and marginalia, often intertwined and inseparable in the original manuscripts, occupy a unique liminal space where poetic intuition and scientific observation perform a incantatory duet.
Though dismissed as nihilistic by more prominent literary figures of his time, Parshchik offered something of the future to those willing to attune their hearing: maps not of land but of longing. His “Cartography of Will” (as interpretative editors have labeled it) increasingly departed from topographical exactitude to explore what Parshchik called “духовные изохроны” (“spiritual isochrones”)—imaginary lines on the metaphysical terrain indicating equal levels of consciousness or existential temperature. One spectral poem, “Карта: Март” (“Map: March”), presents what can only be described as an existential cartogram:
“Ось времени проходит через безмолвие / тени падают не от света, а от слов / и замерзшие взгляды, как маркеры ледников / огибают пустоты внутри нас.”
(“The axis of time passes through silence / shadows fall not from light, but from words / and frozen gazes, like glacial markers / map the voids within us.”)^3
The themes are lapidary and precise: language casting shadows, inner vacuities acquiring topographical meaning, and time’s arrow arching not as progress but as cyclic freeze.
Parshchik’s influence has been more spectral than textual. Though his name appears rarely in anthologies, when it does, it surfaces like a drowned bell. The Ukrainian philosopher Nadiya Soroka credits Parshchik for initiating what she terms the “hydro-thanatology” genre—a metaphysical literature concerned with post-human continuities in aquatic memory.^4 Like the shamanic wanderers of Tungusic folklore, Parshchik emerges as a psychogeographer not merely of space, but of disintegrating mental states under epochal pressure.
This brings us to one of the most enduring fragments from his “Chronogonies” notebook (1967): “То, что плывёт без течения — это не утопленник, это ты, читающий мои слова двадцать лет после моей смерти.”
(“That which drifts without current is not the drowned—it is you, reading my words twenty years after my death.”)
The line uncannily aligns with the metaphysical dénouements of contemporary reader-response theories, except that Parshchik arrives there through Gnostic fracture rather than academic reasoning. In this vision, the reader is transformed not into an interpreter but into the very substance adrift, denied agency yet burdened with a ballast of meaning. It marks an unexpected point of communion: a poet unknown to himself at the center of many minds.
And yet, there is an ethical geometry here that repays the patient eye. The poet becomes cartographer not by choice but by surrender—his life spent hiking estuarine nullities is not wasted, but rather becomes the terrain of revelation. His posthumous readers, too, become drowned cartographers, tracing forgotten boundaries on the palimpsest of civilization. Parshchik’s reflections invite us to consider: might we all be mapping the wrong abstractions?
In another marginal note, Parshchik muses: “Молния на карте — не событие, а вопрос” (“Lightning on a map is not an event, but a question”). His obsession with the map as both representation and lure collapses here delightfully. It is not what *happens* that informs the metaphysical atlas—it is what *asks*. Parshchik transforms action into inquiry, asserting a world where phenomena are not inert occurrences but interrogative presences.
To read him in the 21st century is something of an initiation. One experiences a layered dissolution: first of temporality, then of singular identity, and finally, of interpretive distance itself. You are no longer reading; you are *inside* the cartographic abyss. It answers nothing, but it redraws the questions.
Parshchik died of trenchfoot in 1979, alone in a weather station near Syktyvkar. He left no heirs. But he left dozens of maps fitted with barely legible script, topographies of silence, rivers drawn in ash.
Approaching Parshchik is, perhaps, like mapping the undercurrents between the spoken and the ineffable. His work offers a rare dialectic of uncloaked fragility and paleodescriptive rigor. One leaves him not edified, but altered—not understanding the world better, but no longer being able to see it the same way.
By Martijn Benders – Notebook Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
language, proto-idealism, metaphysics, footnotes, heresy, gnosticism, geography
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^1 Tersova, Polina. “Fragments from ‘The Map of Atemporality’: A Survey of Parshchikiana.” *Journal of Trans-Ural Poetics*, vol. 14, no. 2, 2003, pp. 113–135.
^2 Parshchik, Alexei. “Hydraulic Aphorisms.” *Samizdat Broadsheet 22*, 1964. Reproduced in *Hydromystic Cartographies*, ed. Krzysztof Mimerin, Polprints, 1998.
^3 Parshchik, Alexei. *Карта Безвременья*, unpublished manuscript held at the Irkutsk Regional Archive, File 78-XD12.
^4 Soroka, Nadiya. “Memoryhollows and Hydro-thanatology: Parshchik and Post-River Consciousness.” *Eastern Mystic Geographies*, vol. 8, 2011, pp. 67–89.