Peter Sobotkiewich

The Great Peter Sobotkiewich

I stole the title from the Great Gatsby. For me Peter is as important and significant to life, art and existence, for many of the same reasons, as Fitzgerald’s Gatsby.

But Peter Sobotkiewich is, was a real person and not a story or a work of art.

I can’t begin to totally comprehend his being.

This writing is a recollection about the real person, and therefore not completely true. But only what I surmise and suspect, and imagine about Peter Sobotkiewich. Who, because I am not a mind reader, I could not completely know.

The pictures that follow tell much, and Peter himself posted them. And it is on account of those pictures that I felt urged to write here. Peter posted the pictures, but similar to viewing in an art gallery – there is a silence. I saved them after he died, and they represented to me who he had been. Subsequently the pictures were removed from the internet, and it seemed to me Peter had been deleted. I did not like that, it did not seem right. He was real, he should not have his existence just deleted.

Of all the people in the world who knew him somewhat closely I am perhaps the person he would least like to write of him. He did not like anyone to impersonate or interpret him. He would much prefer to be interpreted in his own right. But if I don’t write about him he will just be gone.

Perhaps Peter himself would prefer to just be gone. It is very possible. But that does not suit me, because he was, and I am still coming to grips with his existence. Therefore that is what this is, my coming to terms with the existence of Peter Sobotkiewich, and reconciling myself to that. And to a certain extent at the same time preserving some of his essence for posterity.

No doubt I would preserve him better if I could portray him exactly as he was, but that is impossible. No one can do that. I could also leave him alone but for me he was larger than that, and deserves to be remembered – deserves not to disappear, as if he never was. This writing, and his pictures, are a testament to his existence.

The photos are the best expression of Peter. But sometimes people and circumstances are helped, or imagined, or better explained with words. There are things pictures only hint at, and perhaps that is what Peter liked about pictures. even though he said he first imagined the pictorial art he created as ideas and words. That seemed very strange to me because so much of my thinking is in images and feelings which I convert to words. Peter seemed to be working in reverse to me.

What follows is but an aspect of what I interpreted from Peter and therefore not absolute truth. Much does come from Peter’s own words, and observed life circumstances, which I interpreted. But perhaps not always correctly.

This picture I believe was taken in the USSR. His smile is the essence of his spirit.

Think of this as an Art Gallery, An Art Gallery of Peter Sobotkiewich where he himself is the subject, mostly in images. We or I  mostly don’t know what  they mean, but they mean something.

I met Peter’s oldest son once, when he was about 2. He seemed as charming as in this picture, happy and content. I could tell he was living in a good home. It is not hard to tell when a child is not.

These are a collage of pictures of Peter’s mother that he posted himself. I know little of her except what Peter told me himself and what the pictures seem to convey. From what I recall she left her husband intermittently, and then completely. Sometimes she brought her children, sometimes she did not. She became a Jehovah’s Witness at some point, and she had Peter go to the door first, and once he had gathered the home owner’s sympathy or interest, she and whoever other adult she was with, would close in for the education, persuasion and conversion. Peter was at the time rather proud of his role.

I do not know much more about his mother, but that she left her husband and family repeatedly when they were young. From the pictures I would surmise she was sometimes a little wild. Perhaps her husband didn’t like that, and that is why she left. Perhaps she found home life too confining and therefore sometimes wanted to leave. Who knows? But whatever she felt it wasn’t a permanent state, she fluctuated and alternated, returned and even sometimes took the children with her. She had religious beliefs. Perhaps they contributed, the clash of the wild versus the religious. But again I don’t know. I suspect, from what I was told happened, she was intermittent in her religious beliefs and convictions, one thing then next another. Very likely the society of the time did not give her a proper outlet for what she felt and thus she was always sort of torn between.

Peter himself had very mixed feelings about his mother, who was French Canadian. He adored her, and yet often had very disdainful and hostile feelings towards French Canadians, and French Canadian culture and tradition. Yet this was bizarre because he lived almost his whole adult life in Quebec with French Canadian friends and French Canadian women. And the last 26 years of his life he lived entirely in Montreal.

I suspect his ambivalent feelings towards Quebec, were actually his ambivalent feelings towards his mother. He loved her, But. Why else would he live most his adult life in Quebec, with French Canadian friends and French Canadian female partners? And why prior to moving to Quebec, and living in Quebec, did he live across the river in Ottawa and have mostly French friends living in Quebec. There is no justifiable reason for this. Many English people live in Ottawa without having any French Canadian friends, never mind occupying most of their social life in Quebec. I believe his friends and his life were in Quebec, as he loved his mother. But he may have also hated her for not consistently being there.

I met Peter’s father once. If his young father was anything at all like his older father when I met him, then it is no wonder Peter’s  mother left him. His father was the most boorish, cruel sadistic parent I have ever known.