Strange Life of Ivan Osokin

"If I had my life to live over again" ... Well, what would you do? Here is the story of Ivan Osokin, a young man who has squandered every chance life has given him. A failure at school, ruined financially, and rejected by the woman he loves, he finds himself at a dead end. He wishes to live his life over again so he can avoid all his mistakes. Then he meets a magician who gives him that chance. ¿Strange Life of Ivan Osokin is a gripping, cinematic story by the great Russian philosopher P.D. Ouspensky. In his classic novel, set in the last years of Tsarist Russia, Ouspensky explores imaginatively one of the chief themes in his philosophical work: the idea of "eternal recurrence." This is the fascinating idea, which also engaged Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, that we live our lives over and over again in a kind of endlessly repeating film, and that nothing will change in this ceaseless whirligig, unless we ourselves change-deeply and fundamentally.

"The feeling for the suspense of the present moment, which hangs like a drop of rain upon the window, containing a whole world in itself." -- V. S. Pritchett Ivan Osokin is in utter despair. He's failed at school, he's broke, and the woman he adores has just abandoned him. If only he could live his life over again and avoid all his mistakes A chance encounter with a magician provides Ivan with that precise opportunity, and he's sent back in time to correct his wrong turns. But even with a fresh start, he's helpless to fix the errors of his past. This intriguing novel by P. D. Ouspensky, one of the most important and influential figures in twentieth-century occultism, inspired the movie Groundhog Day. S et in the final years of czarist Russia, the tale unfolds in Moscow and Paris and offers an imaginative exploration of one of the chief themes in Ouspensky's works: the concept of eternal recurrence, which proposes that our endless repetition of missteps only can be halted by the kind of change that comes from within.

"The feeling for the suspense of the present moment, which hangs like a drop of rain upon the window, containing a whole world in itself." -- V. S. Pritchett Ivan Osokin is in utter despair. He's failed at school, he's broke, and the woman he adores has just abandoned him. If only he could live his life over again and avoid all his mistakes A chance encounter with a magician provides Ivan with that precise opportunity, and he's sent back in time to correct his wrong turns. But even with a fresh start, he's helpless to fix the errors of his past. This intriguing novel by P. D. Ouspensky, one of the most important and influential figures in twentieth-century occultism, inspired the movie Groundhog Day. S et in the final years of czarist Russia, the tale unfolds in Moscow and Paris and offers an imaginative exploration of one of the chief themes in Ouspensky's works: the concept of eternal recurrence, which proposes that our endless repetition of missteps only can be halted by the kind of change that comes from within.