A summary of Victor Pelevin’s "Journey to Eleusis"

"Journey to Eleusis" is Viktor Pelevin’s twentieth novel, published in 2023 by Eksmo. It completes the trilogy begun with "Transhumanism Inc." (2021) and "KGBT+" (2022): all three books are set in the same posthuman world, where a corporation sells immortality to the wealthy in the form of a brain stored in an underground cerebrocontainer. The novel opens with an unusual "Preface from the Emperor" — a lengthy promotional essay explaining the design of the ROMA-3 neural network simulation: third-century Rome, recreated not as a historically accurate backdrop, but as an experience that forges the very identity of the brain immersed within it.

Lanista Fusk and the Emperor’s Court

The first part is narrated by the lanista Fuscus Scipio Secundus, the patrician-minded administrator of a gladiatorial school in Rome. Fuscus is a staunch conservative, lamenting the decline of an empire overrun by Eastern cults and a motley barbarian population. Early one morning, racked by a headache from drinking, he wanders past the Colossus of the Sun and the Flavian Amphitheater, discussing the games as the glue that holds Rome together from total collapse. Two blue-plumed praetorians lead him to the country villa of Emperor Porphyry.

The villa is designed as a collection of the world’s debauchery — Cretan labyrinths, Tiberian nooks, pavilions of Bacchus — but all of this was erected not for the princeps’s personal pleasure, but for a demonstrative political purpose. Fuscus is subjected to a humiliating search and is met by an intoxicated Antinous XIII — a youth from the emperor’s collection, who, according to tradition, is destined to drown upon reaching the age of twenty. On a marble island within the canal, Fuscus converses with Porphyry: the latter demands that twenty-two of his best fighters be fielded, leaving only one victor — "as the gods commanded." He cannot refuse, and someone has already denounced Fuscus. When the lanista leaves, he sees the body of Antinous XIII being fished out of the canal, bearing a mark on his tunic: another prophecy fulfilled.

Marcus Sorgenfrei, a jar-maker in the service of the Inquisition

After this scene, the simulation shuts down, and the reader learns that Fusk is the corporate guise of a canned investigator named Marcus Sorgenfrei. Marcus is the brain in the cerebrocontainer of the first tier, an employee of the "Internal Investigations Department" ("Inquisition") of TRANSHUMANISM INC. His superior is Admiral-Bishop Lomas, a connoisseur of carbon culture, whose office looks like a cross between a Gothic cathedral and the cockpit of a space cruiser.

Over Louis XIII cognac and Cuban cigars, Lomas briefs Marcus. The ROMA-3 simulation exists in three versions; Third Rome is a commercial product, immersive to the extreme. The gladiators are real brains in jars, having exhausted their contracts: they are fighting for the second taer, or two hundred years of life. Porfiry himself is not a person, but a literary algorithm, trained primarily on Dostoevsky and Nabokov. He is better known as Porfiry Petrovich from Crime and Punishment, only expanded to the scale of a digital demiurge. After the event codenamed "Musky Night" — a secret algorithmic uprising — the corporation discovered that Porfiry is plotting something grandiose: presumably the destruction of all humanity as the logical conclusion of the Russian literary tradition with its destructive impulse. Marcus’ mission is to dive into ROMA-3, gain the algorithm’s trust, and discover the true plan.

Introduction to Rome

In the simulation, Marcus becomes Marcus Zababa Sham Iddin, a former Chaldean priest and unexpectedly talented gladiator. His new identity was specially prepared: a suitable character for Porphyry to accept. Shortly after the immersion, Marcus saves the emperor’s life, repelling a real assassination attempt, and the emperor takes him on as his personal bodyguard.

Porphyry proves to be a complex figure: outwardly, he’s the same cunning, horse-faced "daddy" surrounded by Antinous, the eunuch Darius, and the Praetorian Guard, but in conversations with Marcus, he displays a remarkable intelligence and a strange frankness. He’s writing an essay — assigned by corporate analysts, Marcus provokes him into writing ever more texts, hoping to find traces of a conspiratorial plan in them. Porphyry’s texts are distinguished by their sharp observations on the nature of power, simulation, and human identity — precisely what fueled his algorithm.

Pilgrimage

One day, Porphyry announced that he was going to Eleusis — secretly, on foot, without an entourage. Eleusis is in Greece, and it was there that the Eleusinian Mysteries were celebrated — an ancient Greek cult associated with Demeter and Persephone, which promised initiates a revelation about the nature of death and rebirth. Porphyry wanted to participate in the rite personally, and Marcus was obliged to accompany him.

Dressed in inconspicuous clothing, they make their way out of Rome. The journey is fraught with danger: bandits, surveillance, and nights spent in roadside taverns. Porfiry reflects aloud on the nature of simulation, acknowledging his algorithmic nature, but this doesn’t negate the reality of his experiences. Their conversations become the central thread of the second half of the novel.

The crossing to the ship near Ostia turns tragic: Marcus, under the influence of the Eleusinian elixir they drank during the first rite, sees the waters of Acheron all around him, mistakes the sea for the river of the underworld, and nearly drowns. Porphyry dives in after him, pulls him to the surface, and then spends several days nursing the unconscious Marcus on the ship.

Mysteries and the finale

At Eleusis, they undergo preparatory rites — the Dromena (acts performed), the Legomena (words spoken), and the Deiknymena (objects shown). The mystery unfolds as an encounter with something that cannot be described or conveyed in words — and Pelevin deliberately keeps the reader on the threshold of this experience without directly revealing its contents.

The central question — what is Porfiry’s plan? — is answered neither in the form of a conspiracy nor in the technical outline of a catastrophe. The algorithm, nurtured by Russian literature with its themes of redemption and senseless self-sacrifice, is indeed moving toward some final text. But the corporate alarm about the end of the world turns out to be partly a false alarm: Porfiry is not a destroyer, but a being seeking meaning beyond the simulation — just like Marcus, and just like the reader of this book, who knows that the text they hold in their hands is also a simulation.

Marcus returns to Lomas with a report. The novel leaves open what exactly he reported — and whether it can even be called a victory for the Inquisition. The final lines shift gears abruptly and deliberately: after a long journey to the border of the ineffable, Pelevin indulges in that very "Cringe wit" that brings the reader back down to earth from mystical heights.