Dembei - Forgotten Historical Figure in need of a Netflix miniseries

For our first-ever post, let's talk about Dembei. The only source available on the man seems to be a rare out-of-print book by Benson Bobrick, which is the basis for this Wikipedia article. Dembei was a Japanese merchant who was carrying goods by ship when he ran into a storm. The ship was wrecked, and he ended up stranded on the shores of Kamchatka, arguably one of the most remote and inhospitable regions on earth.

Cossack, pirate and explorer.

Dembei was rescued by Vladimir Atlasov (pictured), a cossack and sometime pirate who also happened to be one of the first Russian explorers to Siberia and the Far East at a time when the Empire knew almost nothing about those places. Dembei was brought to St Petersburg (then the Russian capital) against his will; he was presented to Emperor Peter the Great, and it was through him that the Emperor and his court learned of Japan. He ended up spending the rest of his life in St Petersburg.

Reasons why his story would make a great Netflix miniseries:

1. The survival story

Everyone likes a good story of shipwrecked survival. Just look at Robinson Crusoe or the more recent Castaway and Life of Pi. When someone is stranded on their own and forced to survive against the odds, they can be the only person on the screen and we'll still eat it up. Not to mention the subsequent journey through Siberia Dembei must take with Atlasov, plundering along the way.

2. The intrigues in Peter the Great's imperial court

If the cossack explorer Atlasov weren't interesting and badass enough on his own, there's an entire imperial court to deal with once we arrive in St Petersburg. Peter the Great was the man who inherited the Tsardom of Russia and, through a combination of military victories and diplomacy, turned it into the full-fledged Russian Empire.

Under Peter's rule, Russia transformed from a somewhat remote  and insular Eurasian state into a new European power with its capital in St Petersburg, a city named for him and built from scratch under his command.

Peter was busy modernizing his country, but there were competing interests between the various Western advisors-- as well as between his own people. When the head of the Russian Orthodox Church died, he refused to name a successor. Instead, he assembled a synod of ten clergymen to run the church, all jockeying for position and influence, while at the same time making enemies within the church by banning all men under 50 from joining a monastery.

Speaking of making enemies, Peter also reformed the aristocracy in the early 1700s; before then, nobility had existed on a hereditary basis (similar to how they have traditionally existed in Britain) but Peter decided that titles should be based on service to the Emperor rather than noble birth. This cannot have been popular among the members of his imperial court, many of whom would have been competing with his Western advisors, merchants, clergy, and military figures for influence.

Lastly, during the first ten years of the 1700s Russia fought against the Swedish Empire in the Great Northern War, the defining moment in much of Russian and Swedish history, while also engaging in armed struggles against the Turks and being forced to quash rebellions within their own ranks, notably the Bulavin cossack rebellion and the infamous alliance of Ivan Mazepa's cossacks with Sweden. There is certainly no shortage of suspense and intrigue in Peter the Great's Russia to be mined for television.



3. The "stranger-in-a-strange-land" trope

Dembei, as our protagonist, stands in for us; he is as much a stranger to 18th-century Russia as we are, and key plot points can be directly explained onscreen to him as a proxy way of directly explaining them to the viewers. His surprises will be our surprises, his victories our victories, his losses our losses, and all because he is in a land as strange to us as it is to him.

We don't know how long Dembei lived, and as a matter of fact we know very little about his life. But Dembei would make a great protagonist for a Netflix miniseries, if for no other reason than to give us a window into this most fascinating time in history.