OCTOBRIANA:

The Genesis Of A Comics Legend

I have already told how surprised and shocked I was when as a young and earnest student in Kiev in November 1961 I suddenly found myself face to face with a poster of Lenin adorned in a most un-Soviet way with photographs and drawings of pin-up girls. I might have been even more shocked if, at that first meeting, the PPP members had thrust into my hands a recent number of the journal Mtsyry , which included an article over the signature of one Roy Pavel Drakov.

This was the article in which 'Drakov' -- who was, of course, not an individual but a pseudonym of the group -- outlined the genealogy of the character later to become the overriding preoccupation of the PPP group -- Octobriana. In November 1961, of course, the character was still not fully developed. She was the brain child of the group at large, and I suppose one might say that her literary father was a man about whom almost nothing is known -- Kharitonov -- and her literary mother Lydia Borisovna Gal.

But she was presented to the non-indoctrinated readers of Mtsyry as an almost historical character. Roy Pavel Drakov presented what purported to be the early results of exhaustive researches into various manifestations throughout history and pre-history of a 'devil-woman'. This creature, it seemed, had appeared in ancient Singhalese chronicles, in Soviet Kamchatka in the 30s (duly reported in the local press), in Madrid at the time of the Inquisition, in China, where she had been referred to in the 'celebrated travelogue of Chang Chien' as a 'white she-dragon, more beautiful and cruel than all the headmen of China', and even in an unpublished book by the Moroccan politician Ben Barka.

Although 'Drakov' admitted cheerfully that he had as yet insufficient data to produce an exhaustive pseudo-scientific study of the 'devil-woman', his article contained an elaborate genealogy of this mysterious creature, and suggested that the comic-strip versions of her adventures which the group shortly proposed were far from being mere inventions, but were in fact derived from the 600 various sources which he had perused during his researches.

The article was typical of much of PPP's more extravagant work. It relied heavily on the lure of the exotic, and was written, or rather over-written, in a hyperbolic style which to a Western reader might seem simply tedious. But to the sensation-starved Soviet mind, it was an exciting and readable introduction to the theme which was to preoccupy the group for quite a few years to come.

'Drakov' claimed to have gone a long way towards establishing a link between the various pseudo-sources on which he relied. He also claimed to have been able to determine a more or less precise account of who the 'devil-woman' was, where she came from, and why she acted in the way that she did, the way that the strips were later to reveal.

The sources referred to the woman by various names, among which the most convincing deemed to be Mahari. The last part of 'Drakov's' article was subheaded 'The Genesis Of Mahari. The Genesis Of The "Angelic Maiden Who Turned Into A Devil And Was Old As The Sun," to quote from the works of the Japanese philosopher Ishi'. That title gives you something of the flavour of what was to follow. But so that you can perhaps understand the thinking behind Octobriana, and more particularly the mood of her initial begetters, I think it is worthwhile inflicting some of 'Drakov's' article on you, in spite of its rather unwieldy style.

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