Questions about the relationship between earthly power and heavenly power, natural and random, received an epic scale in the novel Earthly Powers (1980). The main character, an 81-year-old modern English writer with a scandalous reputation, recalls his life from the first decades of the 20th century. and until the early 70s, retrospectively reconstructing the main events of the century. An example of his fate, as well as the biography of his friend the priest, who became the Pope in the course of the novel, illustrate Burgess’s idea about the unpredictability of the consequences of human actions. The randomness reigning in the world comes from a source other than human will, and highlights the one-sidedness of the social systems known to the West, be it the order according to St. Augustine or Pelagian freedom. The novel confirmed the stability of the Manichaean position of Burgess, who believes that the bad results of good deeds are explained by “the transformation of God into his opposite.”

I. Muratova

Translation (Alexander Pinsky 2) taken from the site proza.ru.