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This is a sample - For the full text, please visit www.academicstudiespress.com This is a sample - For the full text, please visit www.academicstudiespress.com Companion to Victor Pelevin Copyrighted Material Copyright © Academic Studies Press, 2022 This is a sample - For the full text, please visit www.academicstudiespress.com COMPANIONS TO RUSSIAN LITERATURE Series Editor Thomas Seifrid (University of Southern California, Los Angeles) Copyrighted Material Copyright © Academic Studies Press, 2022 This is a sample - For the full text, please visit www.academicstudiespress.com Companion to Victor Pelevin E dited by Sofya Kh a g i BOSTON 2022 Copyrighted Material Copyright © Academic Studies Press, 2022 This is a sample - For the full text, please visit www.academicstudiespress.com Library of Congress Control Number: 2021949719 Copyright © Academic Studies Press, 2022 ISBN 9781644697757 hardback ISBN 9781644697764 paperback ISBN 9781644697771 ebook PDF ISBN 9781644697788 epub Book design by Kryon Publishing Services, Inc. kryonpublishing.com Cover design by Ivan Grave Academic Studies Press 1577 Beacon Street Brookline, MA 02446, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com Copyrighted Material Copyright © Academic Studies Press, 2022  This is a sample - For the full text, please visit www.academicstudiespress.com Contents Introduction Victor Pelevin: Life, Works, Critical Debates vii Sofya Khagi, University of Michigan Part One: The Post-Soviet 1. The Early Years: Post-Soviet with a Capital “S” 02 Michael Martin, University of Michigan Part Two: Space, Time, History 2. Space-Time Poetics in Chapaev and the Void 24 Sofya Khagi, University of Michigan 3. Parody of Past and Present in Chapaev and the Void 53 Christopher Fort, American University of Central Asia 4. Masking the Void, Voiding the Mask: Viktor Pelevin and the Performance of History 75 Alexander McConnell, University of Michigan Part Three: Simulation and Mind Control 5. “The Battle for Your Mind”: Transformation of Western Social Theory in Generation ‘П’ 106 Dylan Ogden, University of Michigan 6. Totalitarian Literature in Generation ‘П’ Meghan Vicks, University of Colorado, Boulder 127 Copyrighted Material Copyright © Academic Studies Press, 2022 This is a sample - For the full text, please visit www.academicstudiespress.com Part Four: Metamorphosis and Utopia 7. Transformative Reading for Tailless Monkeys: Metamorphoses in The Sacred Book of the Werewolf 160 Grace Mahoney, University of Michigan 8. The Mythic and the Utopian: Visions of the Future through the Lens of Victor Pelevin’s S.N.U.F.F. and Love for Three Zuckerbrins 186 Theodore Trotman, University of Chicago Appendix Select Publications by Victor Pelevin in Russian and English 203 Index 205 Copyrighted Material Copyright © Academic Studies Press, 2022  This is a sample - For the full text, please visit www.academicstudiespress.com Introduction Victor Pelevin: Life, Works, Critical Debates SOFYA KHAGI, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN T he first publication by Victor Pelevin, the tiny story “Sorcerer Ignat and People” (“Koldun Ignat i liudi”), appeared in the December 1989 issue of a pop-scientific journal Science and Religion (Nauka i religiia). At that time, the future preeminent post-Soviet writer worked for the journal, editing trans- lations of esoteric miscellanea by the likes of Carlos Castaneda. As Pelevin’s fairy-tale was published, the Soviet people were preparing for the winter’s celebrations, stocking up on “golden rain” (for New Year trees), tangerines, and peas (for oliv’e, holiday potato salad). When not hunting for cans of peas, employees of the numerous NIIs (Scientific Research Institutes) smoked cig- arettes and debated recent political developments. Schoolgirls sported gaudy plastic clip-on earrings and equally tasteless lurex sweaters; boys cut their hair punk-style and whirled their lanky legs in break dance moves. The Eastern Bloc, meanwhile, was enthusiastically self-destructing. The Berlin Wall had just fallen, the Velvet Revolution was taking place in Czechoslovakia while a not-so- velvet one roiled Romania. At the Malta Summit the fashionably bespectacled, Southern-accented last Soviet general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev went out of his way to impress a quietly observant American president, George H. W. Copyrighted Material Copyright © Academic Studies Press, 2022  This is a sample - For the full text, please visit www.academicstudiespress.com viii Companion to Victor Pelevin Bush. There was a heady, glittery, festive feeling everywhere—as when New Year’s Eve approaches or history is poised to enter a nosedive.1 Cover, Nauka i religiia 12 (1989). Viktor Pelevin, “Koldun Ignat i liudi,” Nauka i religiia 12 (1989). The December 1989 issue of Science and Religion circulated in 530,000 copies—unremarkable by Soviet standards—cost forty kopecks, and, along 1 This period known as Perestroika was the policy or practice of reforming the economic and political system promoted by Mikhail Gorbachev. Perestroika originally referred to increased automation and labor efficiency but came to entail greater awareness of economic markets and the ending of central planning. Copyrighted Material Copyright © Academic Studies Press, 2022  This is a sample - For the full text, please visit www.academicstudiespress.com Introduction ix with “Sorcerer Ignat and People,” featured pop-scientific articles and a horo- scope for 1990.2 The latter is noteworthy. To be sure, neither Gorbachev nor Pelevin suspected at the time that they would end up the last Soviet general secretary or the number one post-Soviet writer. Their compatriots had no idea they would soon be leaving the cozy smoke-filled lounges of the NIIs, their bellies full of dissident fervor, to line up in the marketplace wearing respect- able muskrat hats and selling all kinds of garbage. The attempted coup against Gorbachev, the shelling of the Parliament, the Dubrovka and Beslan massacres, the two Chechen wars, the two heavily inebriated terms of the Yeltsin pres- idency, the sober Putin presidencies (four and counting)—all of these were matters of the future.3 As the Strugatsky brothers have observed, the future “is never good or bad. It is never what we expect.”4 But Pelevin himself would point out that the degree of misunderstanding—the non-critical thinking or rather not thinking at all—was much higher than average as the Soviet Union careened its way to disaster. Companion to Victor Pelevin spotlights one of the most important, original, and thoughtful contemporary writers. Over the three decades since the appear- ance of his first story, Pelevin has accomplished much: he has chronicled the post-Soviet condition with photographic precision, anatomized global postmo- dernity, techno-consumerism, and media mirages, laughed his fill and pleaded for seriousness, over-produced books and puns, and along the way delighted and infuriated critics. Perhaps above all, he has continuously encouraged 2 Sergei Polotovskii and Roman Kozak, Pelevin i pokolenie pustoty (Moscow: Mann, Ivanov, and Farber, 2012), 48. As of the present, this book is the only extant biography of Pelevin. The only extant Russian-language monograph, Ol’ga Bogdanova, Sergei Kibal’nik, and Liudmila Safronova, Literaturnye strategii Viktora Pelevina (St. Petersburg: Petropolis, 2008), examines the Peleviniana of the early to mid-1990s. 3 This is also known as the GKChP, or The State Committee on the State of Emergency, when a group of high-level Soviet officials and the KGB attempted a coup d’état against Gorbachev on August 19, 1991. The constitutional crisis of 1993 was a political standoff between Yeltsin and the Russian parliament that was resolved by military force. The seizure of Dubrovka Theatre by armed Chechens on October 23, 2002 ended with the deaths of at least 170 people. The Beslan massacre by Islamic militants started on September 1, 2004, lasted three days, involved the imprisonment of over 1,100 people as hostages (including 777 children), and ended with the deaths of at least 334 people. The First Chechen War was fought from December 1994 to August 1996, the Second Chechen War from August 1999 to April 2009. The two terms of Yeltsin’s presidency ran 1991 to 1996 and 1996 to 1999. The terms of Putin’s presidencies (so far) have been 2000 to 2004, 2004 to 2008, 2012 to 2018, and 2018 to 2024. 4 Arkadii and Boris Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii v odinnadtsati tomakh (Donetsk: Stalker, 2000–2003), 12:161. Copyrighted Material Copyright © Academic Studies Press, 2022  This is a sample - For the full text, please visit www.academicstudiespress.com x Companion to Victor Pelevin his readers to think—not so they “understand more than anyone else” like Tatarsky, the hapless protagonist of Generation ‘П’ (1999), who puts what little he does understand to ill use—but so they try to figure out things about the world they live in and themselves.5 If the exercise of reason as such is a virtue— as some people still believe according to the old-fashioned Enlightenment mode—then Pelevin is a virtuous writer par excellence. If “thought work” is a crime under totalitarian regimes (à la Orwell), then he is all the more essential. And, besides, it is great fun giving your brain cells a work out along with him. Beginnings Pelevin is notoriously averse to media and social appearances. A remark on the 2004 novel, The Sacred Book of the Werewolf (Sviashchennaia kniga oborotnia), is characteristic: “All I wanted to say to journalists I said in this book.”6 His interviews, infrequent in the 1990s and the 2000s, have evaporated in the last decade.7 As a result, we have little beyond the basic biographical facts and scant direct commentary from the author about his life and work. Victor Olegovich Pelevin was born on November 22, 1962 into the well positioned Moscow family of Zinaida Efremova, director of a grocery store, and Oleg Pelevin, faculty member in the Military Department of Bauman State Technical University.8 He studied in the elite School Number 31 in downtown Moscow, which offered enhanced English-language training. Pelevin attended classes alongside children from the political and cultural elite. After graduating 5 Viktor Pelevin, Generation ‘П’ (Moscow: Vagrius, 1999), 101. 6 Pelevin, “Neskol’ko raz mne mereshchilos’, budto ia stuchu po klavisham lis’imi lapami,” interview by Natal’ia Kochetkova, Izvestiia, November 16, 2004, https://iz.ru/ news/296562, accessed March 10, 2020. 7 For Pelevin’s select interviews, see “Mirom pravit iavnaia lazha,” interview by Anna Narinskaia, Ekspert 11, March 22, 1999, http://pelevin.nov.ru/interview/o-exprt/1.html, accessed April 6, 2020; “Victor Pelevin by Leo Kropywiansky,” Bomb Magazine, April 2002, https://bombmagazine.org/articles/victor-pelevin/, accessed April 6, 2020; “Otvety: Viktor Pelevin, pisatel’,” interview by Lev Danilkin, Afisha, September 2, 2003, http:// www.afisha.ru/article/viktor_pelevin, accessed March 30, 2020; “Viktor Pelevin: Istoriia Rossii—eto prosto istoriia mody,” Gazeta.ru, February 9, 2003, https://www.gazeta. ru/2003/09/02/viktorpelevi.shtml, accessed March 1, 2020; “Neskol’ko raz mne meresh- chilos’, budto ia stuchu po klavisham lis’imi lapami”; “Vampir v Rossii bol’she chem vampir,” interview by Natal’ia Kochetkova, Izvestiia, November 3, 2006, https://pelevinlive.ru/, accessed April 1, 2020; “Oligarkhi rabotaiut geroiami moikh knig,” interview by Natal’ia Kochetkova, Izvestiia, September 7, 2009, http://www.izvestia.ru/news/341912, accessed March 3, 2020. 8 Much of the account here relies on Polotovskii and Kozak. Copyrighted Material Copyright © Academic Studies Press, 2022  This is a sample - For the full text, please visit www.academicstudiespress.com Introduction xi from school in 1979, Pelevin entered the Moscow Power Engineering Institute (MEI), a first-rate institution specializing in engineering and electronics. He graduated from its Department of Electric Equipment and Automatics with honors in 1985. Two years later he passed exams for postgraduate studies and entered a PhD program at MEI. He did not defend his doctoral thesis and decided to change his career, having developed an interest in writing. In 1988 Pelevin enrolled in the Moscow Gorky Literary Institute. He com- bined his studies as a part-time student with work as a journalist, editor, pub- lisher, and staff correspondent in periodicals such as Science and Religion and Face-to-Face (Litsom k litsu) as well as the small publishing house Day (Den’). There Pelevin edited and translated works on Oriental mysticism. He flunked out of the Literary Institute in 1991. That same year he was appointed head of the sci-fi department in the prestigious “thick journal” (tolstyi zhurnal) Banner (Znamia).9 As a young man Pelevin came under the influence of bohemian groups interested in esoteric texts, Eastern and Western philosophies, New Age ideas, and altered states of consciousness.10 His first short stories came out in the late 1980s in the pop-scientific periodicals Science and Religion and Chemistry and Life (Nauka i zhizn’).11 Pelevin’s 1990 short story “Hermit and Six Toes” (“Zatvornik i shesti- palyi”) captures in a microcosm much of his cosmology and narrative tech- nique. A story about broiler chickens raised at a chicken farm, it begins with a meeting between two outcasts, the enlightened Hermit and the deformed Six Toes. According to Six Toes, the world in which they live is enclosed within “the Wall of the World,” governed by “Twenty Closest,” and has at its apex the feeding-trough and the drinking-trough. The Hermit explains to his disciple that, in reality, their world is but one of seventy worlds traveling through space on a black belt within the universe called “Lunacharsky Chicken Factory.” The 9 “Thick journal” is a type of literary periodical originating in imperial Russia and continuing in the Soviet Union and modern Russia. It typically runs several hundred pages, appears several times a year, and is a major vehicle of the propagation of culture. 10 “One gathering that influenced the young author was a salon in Yuzhinsky Pereulok (now Bol'shoi Palashevsky). House Number 29 was the gathering place of late Soviet thinkers who blended diverse philosophical movements with everyday life that was very distant from byt under socialism.” In St. Petersburg Pelevin “got acquainted with Castaneda’s translator, a yogi and Zen Buddhist Vasily Maximov. . . . Maximov, the prototype for the guru Chapaev, is featured in many anecdotes.” Polotovskii and Kozak, Pelevin i pokolenie pustoty, 36. 11 Along with the publication of “Sorcerer Ignat and People,” 1989 saw his translation of The Book of Runes: A Handbook for the Use of an Ancient Oracle, which appeared in Science and Religion. Copyrighted Material Copyright © Academic Studies Press, 2022  This is a sample - For the full text, please visit www.academicstudiespress.com xii Companion to Victor Pelevin end of the world is approaching fast since the chickens are to be slaughtered in less than twenty-four hours. In the story’s finale, the two protagonists manage to beat the laws of their prison and fly away into freedom. The Blue Lantern (Sinii fonar’, 1991), Pelevin’s first short story collection, offers vignettes of life under perestroika that are simultaneously photographi- cally vivid and absurdist.12 This work raised Pelevin to a new level in his literary career, from fiction section in pop-scientific journals to publishing in literary journals and with major presses. The Blue Lantern drew attention with its idio- syncratic combinations of Western and Eastern philosophizing, references to Zen Buddhism, altered states of consciousness, computer worlds, and surreal satires of late Soviet and post-Soviet realities. It introduced Pelevin’s favorite motifs such as solipsism, the illusory nature of material reality, the indetermi- nacy of human consciousness and its relationship to the external world, the blurring of the boundaries between waking life, dreams, and death, and alter- native histories and selves. Among the collection’s stories, “The Prince of Gosplan” (“Prints gos- plana”) depicts one workday in the life of Sasha, a minor employee at the late Soviet governmental agency Gossnab. We meet him at his computer console, immersed in his favorite game The Prince of Persia. In virtual reality Sasha assumes the role of a valiant prince who must overcome obstacles to progress from level one to level twelve, where he can reach the princess. In “Vera Pavlovna’s Ninth Dream” (“Deviatyi son Very Pavlovny”), the eponymous character is the cause of changes affecting her country under perestroika: she works in a public toilet and inundates Russia with feces. “Mid-Game” (“Mittel’shpil’”) narrates the adventures of two prostitutes who turn out to be transsexuals and former party functionaries. “The Crystal World” (“Khrustal’nyi mir”) takes place on the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution. A pair of cadets are guarding the Smolnyi Institute, the soon-to-be headquarters of the revolution, as a disguised Lenin is heading there. The cadets fail to recognize the Bolshevik leader, and history unfolds as we know it. “The Blue Lantern” (“Sinii fonar’”) is about a group of boys who frighten each other with nighttime stories about corpses 12 It won the Little Booker Prize the following year. The Blue Lantern also won the Interpresskon Gold Snail Award, established under Boris Strugatsky’s patronage. The collection includes “Hermit and Six Toes,” “The Prince of Gosplan,” “The Crystal World,” “The Life and Adventures of Shed Number XII” (“Zhizn’ i prikliucheniia saraia nomer XII”), “Vera Pavlovna’s Ninth Dream,” “A Werewolf ’s Problem in Central Russia” (“Problema vervolka v srednei polose”), “Mid-Game,” “Sleep” (“Spi”), and the title story “The Blue Lantern.” Copyrighted Material Copyright © Academic Studies Press, 2022  This is a sample - For the full text, please visit www.academicstudiespress.com Introduction xiii that do not realize they are dead. The implication is that the story’s characters may be dead themselves. Pelevin’s first longer work, the novella Omon Ra, came out in 1992 in Banner and in book form from the Moscow publishing house Text (Tekst).13 This is the story of a young boy, named by his father after the OMON (a special division of the Soviet police), who renames himself Ra after the Egyptian god of the sun. Omon dreams of space as something that provides the means to escape his life’s sordid realities. He is accepted to flight school and the Soviet space program, and learns that the supposedly automated Soviet moon explo- ration robots have young men hidden in them. There is no way for them to return to earth. The story’s finale reveals another layer of deception: Omon never left Earth, and the whole space program is a fake on the part of Soviet authorities doing their best to compete with the US. Omon Ra is clearly a spoof on space travel, a staple of Soviet utopianism. However, as early as this novella, the parody of Soviet ideology is intertwined with a more wistful outlook toward the “heroes of the Soviet cosmos” (the novella’s epigraph). Omon Ra was followed by the novella The Life of Insects (Zhizn’ naseko- mykh, 1993), published in Banner and by the publishing house Vagrius. It is set at a post-perestroika Crimean resort and structured as a collection of intercon- nected episodes, each focused on the life of an anthropomorphized insect or a group of insects. Several species are depicted—mosquitoes, dung beetles, ants, moths, flies, cicadas—all of them struggling to survive and succeed, searching for the meaning of life, consuming others and being consumed themselves. Except for the story about the moth Mitya who attains literal and figurative enlightenment, rising above the chain of consumption and turning into a glow- worm at the book’s finale, the lives of the insects in the novella illustrate the same relentless ethos. One more novella, The Yellow Arrow (Zheltaia strela), published in the journal New World (Novyi mir) in 1993, uses the trope of a train to comment on late Soviet and early post-Soviet history. The train is moving toward a ruined bridge, and the people inside do not realize they are in fact its passengers and have no idea where they are going. The land outside the train for them is the realm of the dead. The protagonist Andrei comes to see the train for what it is, and when it stops unexpectedly, he disembarks and departs into nature. 13 It received two awards from Interpresskon. Copyrighted Material Copyright © Academic Studies Press, 2022  This is a sample - For the full text, please visit www.academicstudiespress.com xiv Companion to Victor Pelevin The Classics Pelevin’s most famous and arguably best novel to date is Chapaev and the Void (Chapaev i pustota, translated into English as Buddha’s Little Finger and The Clay Machine Gun). It first came out in Banner (April and May 1996 issues) and was published in book form by Vagrius that same year.14 Two temporal-spatial planes coexist in the novel—the Russian Civil War and the post-Soviet 1990s. The narrative homes in on two critical points of modern Russian history, posi- tioned symmetrically at the turn and close of the twentieth century, and draws analogies between the breakdown of imperial Russia and the Soviet Union. In the “common-sense” reading, the novel’s action occurs on the outskirts of post-Soviet Moscow where the protagonist Pyotr Pustota is being treated for schizophrenia in a psychiatric hospital while imagining himself to be fighting alongside legendary war hero Vasily Chapaev circa 1919. In a more solipsistic interpretation, Pustota makes the Civil War temporal layer his reality (as real as anything can get—his psychic space) before rejecting both timelines in favor of an even greater freedom—the Buddhist-like emptiness of Inner Mongolia. Viktor Pelevin, Chapaev i pustota (Moscow: Vagrius, 1996). Public domain. 14 The Vagrius edition appeared in bookstores on January 1, 1996, and when thirty thousand copies quickly sold out, twenty thousand more were quickly produced. Copyrighted Material Copyright © Academic Studies Press, 2022  This is a sample - For the full text, please visit www.academicstudiespress.com Introduction xv Generation ‘П’ (1999), translated into English as Homo Zapiens and Babylon, came out on the eve of the twenty-first century, became an instant bestseller, and remains one of the most emblematic texts about the 1990s.15 Vavilen Tatarsky, the hero of the novel, comes of age as the Soviet Union disin- tegrates. As a youngster, he was an aspiring poet and a student at the Moscow Literary Institute. With the collapse of the country, he becomes, first, a lowly shop assistant, and later an advertising copywriter, whose job is to produce Russian ads patterned on the latest American advertising techniques. By the novel’s end, he presides over Russian advertising as a kind of media divinity. As Tatarsky prospers in the advertising business, there unfolds a savage Pelevinian spoof of Russia’s transformation into a techno-consumer society. Viktor Pelevin, Generation “П” (Moscow: Vagrius, 1991). Public domain. The publication of Generation ‘П’ was followed by a four-year hiatus, during which no new book was published; Pelevin spent part of the time on a writing fellowship in Germany. In 2003 he left Vagrius and signed a contract with the publishing conglomerate Eksmo. His first book with Eksmo, DPP(NN): The Dialectic of the Transitional Period from Nowhere to Nowhere (DPP(NN): 15 The initial circulation ran thirty-five thousand copies; forty thousand more followed; at the end of 1999, twenty thousand more copies went out. Copyrighted Material Copyright © Academic Studies Press, 2022  This is a sample - For the full text, please visit www.academicstudiespress.com xvi Companion to Victor Pelevin dialektika perekhodnogo perioda iz nioutkuda v nikuda, 2003), was a volume made up of a novel, a novella, and five short stories.16 The collection includes the opening novel Numbers (Chisla), a story about a post-Soviet businessper- son captivated by the magic of numbers, and the novella “The Macedonian Critique of French Thought” (“Makedonskaia kritika frantsuzskoi mysli”), a black-humor fantasy of Soviet people transformed posthumously into oil and oil money and trafficked to the West.17 The Sacred Book of the Werewolf came out the following year. It is nar- rated by a two-thousand-year-old werefox, A Huli, who looks like a teenage girl and works as a prostitute in Moscow, where she meets and falls in love with an FSB general and werewolf, Sasha the Grey. The novel’s central mystery involves the super-werewolf: what it is and how to become one. To Sasha, who meta- morphoses into the black dog Pizdets (a continuation of Generation ‘П’), the super-werewolf commands the magical ability to destroy things. A Huli’s path, by contrast, moves toward reckoning and potential salvation. The super-wolf is going to atone for the sins of the werefoxes by giving them a book that explains how to enter the mystical “Rainbow Stream.” Since the world created by the tail of the were-fox is brimful of greed and selfishness, the were-creature must learn what love is and direct the feeling of love against her own tail (thereby abort- ing material reality). On the novel’s last page, A Huli breaks through the illu- sory material world she herself creates and escapes into the Buddhist Rainbow Stream. Empire V/Ampir V: A Novella about a Real Superman (Empire V/Ampir V: Povest' o nastoiashchem sverkhcheloveke, 2006), a sequel to Generation ‘П’, is another Pelevinian parable about the degradations of techno-consumer con- temporaneity. This is the story of an anonymous vampire dictatorship into which Roman Shtorkin, a young Muscovite, is initiated. Neoliberal vampires have converted to a more peaceful form of feeding off humans—no longer drinking blood but living off so-called bablos (a word for money in criminal argo). The rulers of the world milk humans for a concentrate of money or, rather, the vital human energy expended in pursuit of money. Exuding frenetic energy in a pursuit of consumerism-based stimulation, human cattle produce money not for themselves but from themselves. Over the course of the novel, Roma learns “glamour” and “discourse,” the two skills necessary for a vampire 16 Since the appearance of DPP(NN), Pelevin has produced a book nearly each year. 17 DPP(NN) received the Apollon Grigoryev and the National Bestseller awards. Copyrighted Material Copyright © Academic Studies Press, 2022  This is a sample - For the full text, please visit www.academicstudiespress.com Introduction xvii to milk humans, and becomes (like Tatarsky ascending to the upper echelons of the media world) a highly positioned figure in the vampire hierarchy. T (2009) exposes the conditions of the modern literary business.18 To meet the demands of the market, Leo Tolstoy’s final flight from his estate to regain freedom and meaning late in life is rewritten in the manner of a retro- detective novel à la Boris Akunin’s bestsellers. Unlike the elderly Tolstoy, Count T is a handsome youthful nobleman, proficient in martial arts. Each move that takes place in the narrative is determined by marketing consider- ations: T piles corpse upon corpse on his way to hermitage because the story of a repentant old Tolstoy would not sell well; he strives to reach the Optina Pustyn’ hermitage because the book’s sponsors want to promote a tale of the excommunicated great novelist reconciled to official Orthodoxy; and there are many other examples. As T discovers, his existence as a character in a popular novel explains his inability to act freely and the lurid quality of the events that befall him. Unlike nineteenth-century writers who created texts that touched human souls, modern-day creators transform life’s perceptions into pulp fic- tion that yields maximum profit.19 Later Works In 2010 Pelevin published Pineapple Water for the Beautiful Lady (Ananasnaia voda dlia prekrasnoi damy), a collection opening with the novella “Operation ‘Burning Bush’” (“Operatsiia ‘Burning Bush’”). This is the story of a down- on-his-luck teacher of English, a Russian Jew named Semyon Levitan, who is forced by the FSB (the Russian Federal Security Service) to pose as God to George W. Bush, then US president. Levitan is a literal deus ex machina who speaks to the White House via a top-secret engineering invention. In turn, CIA agents had been posing as Satan to the Russian side since at least Stalin’s time. In this story, the powerful and the powerless of the world alike (the Russians, the Americans, Bush, Levitan, and so forth) are dupes in games of mutual decep- tion conducted by competing secret services and enabled by advanced tech- nologies. “Anti-Aircraft Codices of Al-Efesbi” (“Zenitnye kodeksy Al’-Efesbi”), the second story, depicts the life of Savely Skotenkov, former professor and cultural critic, who finds his true vocation in destroying unmanned American 18 In 2009 Pelevin was voted “Russia’s number one intellectual” by openportal.ru. 19 Other texts of the 2000s include The Helmet of Horror: The Myth of Theseus and the Minotaur (Shlem uzhasa: kreatiff o Tesee i Minotavre, 2005) and P5. Farewell Songs of Pindostan’s Political Pigmies (P5. Proshchal’nye pesni politicheskikh pigmeev Pindostana, 2008). Copyrighted Material Copyright © Academic Studies Press, 2022  This is a sample - For the full text, please visit www.academicstudiespress.com xviii Companion to Victor Pelevin aircraft over Afghanistan. Skotenkov takes out drones over the Afghan desert by drawing verbal formulas in the sand that involve politically incorrect invec- tives aimed at neoliberal values. As a result, a drone’s controlling computer begins to experience an intense emotion (anger), which gives rise to artificial intelligence endowed with consciousness and will. The futuristic dystopia S.N.U.F.F. (2011) maintains a strong focus on the problems of media deception, the degradation of humankind under techno-consumerism, and the relationship between the imperialist West (the United States) and the now colonized Russia/ Eastern Europe. S.N.U.F.F. por- trays a post-nuclear war world divided into Byzantium or Big Biz and Urkaina or Orkland. The former is an affluent, business-oriented, technologically advanced Western society. The latter is an autocratic, devastated, economi- cally backward part of the territories of the former Russia and Ukraine. The uber-consumer “liberative demautocracy” of Byzantium is equipped with all the high-tech of the past but is no longer capable of developing scientifically or culturally. Byzantium considers the Urks/Orks below to be subhuman. It makes use of Orkland as a colony and an energy source (Orkland possesses huge reserves of gas), buys its infants, puppeteers its leaders (a quasi-criminal ring supported by Byzantium), and conducts incessant warfare among its people for entertainment. Love for Three Zuckerbrins (Liubov’ k trem tsukerbrinam, 2014) hear- kens back to the multiple psychic timelines of Chapaev and the Void, but with ethical concerns gaining prominence over more solipsistic scenarios. The text reinterprets the multiverse of alternative history as a constellation of individual ethics-dependent projections. Its central event is a slaughter in the offices of the liberal website contra.ru carried out by a radical Islamic suicide bomber, Batu Karaev. One of the employees of contra.ru, the IT worker Kesha, is an inter- net troll enamored of violent computer games and online pornography. One of the many victims of the suicide blast, Kesha (along with Karaev) is reincar- nated in a twenty-fourth century cyberpunk setting ruled by the Zuckerbrins (a portmanteau word made up from Mark Zuckerberg, cofounder of Facebook, and Sergei Brin, founder of Google). In that future, human bodies atrophy in miniscule cells, while human brains have wires implanted that connect them to the overlaying computer interface. The Internet monitors everyone’s thoughts for political correctness and compels the populace to share their pri- vate activities via social networks. By introducing a deadly virus into people’s internet-induced dreams, Karaev kills everyone for real. The book’s final part depicts a reincarnation of the contra.ru office custodian Nadya, a compas- Copyrighted Material Copyright © Academic Studies Press, 2022  This is a sample - For the full text, please visit www.academicstudiespress.com Introduction xix sionate young woman untouched by the climate of violence and indifferent to the media and online diversions. In the future, Nadya reemerges as an angel in a private paradise-like realm inhabited by a group of her former coworkers (reincarnated as animals) whom she takes care of as best she can. The two-part The Warden (Smotritel’, 2015) portrays one more alterna- tive historical timeline of a spiritual order, positioned in the consciousness of its protagonist. The hero, Alex, exists in a mental construct called the Idyllium, conjured up by late eighteenth-century mystics Emperor Paul I of Russia, the son of Peter III and Catherine the Great, Benjamin Franklin, and the German- Austrian doctor Franz Anton Mesmer, inventor of the theory of animal magne- tism. Since earthly politics cannot be cleansed of cynicism, villainy, and blood, the elect few escape into a parallel psychic reality, mediated by heterogeneous Russian and Western cultural material (such as fiction, esoteric literature, and art). If one cannot improve upon the politics of “Old Earth,” one can at least construct a spiritual-cultural bomb shelter. iPhuck 10 (2017), like T, grapples with the theme of artistic exhaustion. The plot takes place in the mid-twenty-first century, narrated by a literary-police computer algorithm called Porfiry Petrovich, namesake of the master detective in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (Prestuplenie i nakazanie, 1866). Porfiry investigates crimes and composes detective novels about them. When he is loaned to an opportunistic art critic, Marukha Cho, he navigates the arts black market and hunts for coveted gips (plasters)—early twenty-first-century art objects that are not original themselves but are valued for striving to breathe new life into earlier, authentic art forms. Like T with its team of hack writers, or S.N.U.F.F. with its sommelier (professional selectors of previous texts who replace old-school writers), iPhuck 10 advances a severe critique of contem- porary art as parasitizing off older genuinely creative works. This later novel also provides an opportunity for Pelevin to contemplate his extended artistic trajectory and respond face-on to critical charges of auto-repetition: “Writers can be of two kinds. Those who, all their lives, write one book—and those who, all their lives, write none.”20 20 Victor Pelevin, iPhuck 10 (Moscow: Eksmo, 2017), 217. His other texts of the previous decade include Batman Apollo (2013), Methuselah’s Lamp, or the Final Battle of the Checkists and the Masons (Lampa Mafusaila, ili Krainiaia bitva chekistov s masonami, 2016), Secret Views of Mount Fuji (Tainye vidy na goru Fudzi, 2018), The Art of Light Touches (Iskusstvo legkikh kasanii, 2019) and The Invincible Sun (Nepobedimoe solntse, 2020), the last publication as of the present. Batman Apollo is a sequel to Generation ‘П’ and Empire V. Methuselah’s Lamp was shortlisted for the Big Book Prize, and iPhuck 10 received the Andrey Bely Prize. Copyrighted Material Copyright © Academic Studies Press, 2022  This is a sample - For the full text, please visit www.academicstudiespress.com xx Companion to Victor Pelevin Critical Debates: Russia Peleviniana is cerebral, complex, and uncomfortable. It runs on contradictions and paradoxes and is resistant to assimilation under narrow ideological and aesthetic agendas. It is no surprise that debates around Pelevin’s oeuvre have proved some of the most heated in post-Soviet cultural circles. As his ground- breaking early works such as The Blue Lantern, Omon Ra, The Life of Insects, and The Yellow Arrow made their appearance, prominent critics like Alexander Genis lauded the emergence of an original authorial voice. Genis endorsed the author as a gifted representative of a new generation of writers who (unlike a slightly older Sorokin) moves beyond sheer deconstruction and comes up with a trenchant vision of his own: “Pelevin does not destroy; he builds. Using the same fragments of the Soviet myth as Sorokin, he constructs both subject matter and concepts.” The mystic Pelevin locates “pure being inside the indi- vidual soul” and shows “how to cultivate a metaphysical reality, which does not exist but can be created.”21 Although Chapaev and the Void represents not only the acme of Pelevin’s art but one of the most remarkable books to appear on the literary scene since the dissolution of the USSR, at its publication, the novel solidified Pelevin’s popular success with readers but incurred a mixed critical reaction. Irina Rodnyanskaya praised the author as an outstanding artist, “first and foremost an owner of a creative imagination, a miracle of miracles . . . , and only secondly a philosophizing messenger of ‘Inner Mongolia’.”22 Dmitry Bykov character- ized the book as “not a mere computer game, even if an advanced one, but a serious novel destined for multiple re-readings.” Having passed through its labyrinths, “we are left not with emptiness but with a gigantic load of things we’ve seen and thought about.”23 Rodnyanskaya and Bykov articulated their endorsements of Pelevin’s novel in ways that were polemical vis-à-vis a signifi- cant group of critics who did not take kindly to his Zen Buddhist “quirks” and 21 Alexander Genis, “Borders and Metamorphoses: Victor Pelevin in the Context of Post- Soviet Literature,” in Russian Postmodernism: New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture, ed. Mkhail Epstein, Alexander Genis, and Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover (New York: Berghahn Books, 1999), 214, 224. The essay also appeared in Twentieth-Century Russian Literature: Selected Papers from the Fifth World Congress of Central and East European Studies, Warsaw, 1995, edited by Karen L. Ryan and Barry P. Scherr (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 294–306. It was originally published under the title “Viktor Pelevin: Granitsy i metamor- fozy,” Znamia 12 (1995): 210–214. 22 Irina Rodnianskaia, “. . . i k nei bezumnaia liubov’ . . . ,” Novyi mir 9 (1996): 212–216. 23 Dmitrii Bykov, “Pobeg v Mongoliiu,” Literaturnaia gazeta, May 29, 2006, http://pelevin. nov.ru/stati/odva/1.html, accessed January 7, 2017. Copyrighted Material Copyright © Academic Studies Press, 2022  This is a sample - For the full text, please visit www.academicstudiespress.com Introduction xxi dismissed him as a frivolous and emotionally deprived gamer. Indeed, the novel earned disfavor from the more conservative side of the literary establishment on multiple counts: as pretentious philosophizing, vacuous play, irresponsible, socially unconstructive—and worse, harmful to the traditional Russian ethos. Its popular success likely contributed to such critical disparagement.24 Some critics, such as Igor Shaitanov, condemned Chapaev and The Void as a col- lection of dangerous verbal games that distort key Russian values.25 Andrei Nemzer, who has been especially hostile to Pelevin throughout his literary career, viewed his Zen Buddhist philosophy as sheer charlatanism and rebuked the author for evading moral judgment.26 Once Pelevin solidified his status as a literary brand in the 2000s, the charges against his mature productions no longer took issue with his subversive play and instead zeroed in on his alleged conceptual and aesthetic ossification: “Pelevin during the period of the appearance of Omon Ra and Chapaev . . . is one writer. Pelevin working as a thresher in the purely commercial enterprise Eksmo . . . is something completely different.”27 Bykov envisioned his fellow writer’s alleged downward spiral as artistic and conceptual self-recycling due to his disappointment with post-Soviet realia.28 Grounded in late Soviet culture and disillusioned with post-Soviet inanities, he chose not to develop as an artist at all out of sheer contempt for his “undeserving” readership. Indeed, post-Chapaev, Pelevin’s metaphysical framework remains basically unchanged: the illusory nature of the world, carnal materiality, solipsism, the fail- ure of the human subject, the promise of Zen Buddhist enlightenment. The real issue, however, is less that he is pedaling the same philosophical-metaphysical notions consistently and obsessively, but that no text after the 1996 novel rivals 24 Pavel Basinsky found Pelevin’s portrayal of the Civil War “offensive to anyone with respect for one’s national, professional, and cultural identity.” Pavel Basinskii, “Iz zhizni otechestven- nykh kaktusov,” Literaturnaia gazeta, May 29, 1996, 4. 25 Shaitanov justified Chapaev not making it onto the Booker shortlist in 1997 by likening the novel to a computer virus destroying Russian culture. Igor’ Shaitanov, “Booker-97: Zapiski ‘nachal’nika premii’,” Voprosy literatury 3 (1998), magazines.russ.ru/voplit/1998/3/shait. html, accessed March 8, 2019. 26 Andrei Nemzer, “Kak ia upustil kar’eru: Viktor Pelevin. Chapaev i pustota,” Znamia 4–5 (1996), http://pelevin.nov.ru/stati/o-nemz/1.html, accessed March 8, 2019. 27 By “thresher” (a person or machine that separates grain from the plants by beating) Basinsky is referring to the mechanistic nature of Pelevin’s production post-2000. Pavel Basinskii, “Gudvin, vykhodi,” Rossiiskaia gazeta 71 (5744), April 2, 2012, https://rg.ru/2012/04/02/ basinskii.html, accessed March 15, 2019. 28 Dmitrii Bykov, “Pelevin: put’ vniz,” 2014, https://www.litres.ru/dmitriy-bykov/bykov-o- pelevine-put-vniz-lekciya-pervaya/chitat-onlayn/, accessed March 6, 2020. Copyrighted Material Copyright © Academic Studies Press, 2022  This is a sample - For the full text, please visit www.academicstudiespress.com xxii Companion to Victor Pelevin its conceptual and aesthetic execution of said metaphysics. If Pelevin is at his philosophical and aesthetic peak in Chapaev and the Void, Generation ‘П’ and its sequel Empire V are likely his strongest social satires. His fin-de-siècle novel excels in its acidic analysis of the 1990s and points presciently to the current millennium. Empire V develops Pelevin’s scathing account of a contemporary humanity enthralled by techno-consumerism to its richest vision. By now, Pelevin has entered literary history as the preeminent writer of the 1990s. His recent output has been received much more coldly than his groundbreaking initial productions. Like reviews of the 2000s, critical responses of the last decade tend to charge Pelevin with auto-recycling as well as didacti- cism and a growing traditionalism. In fact, accusations against the “late” Pelevin are diametrically opposed to critiques of his early work while being equally harsh. The writer whose unbridled play used to discomfit traditionalist critics is now charged with turning conservative himself and indulging in preachiness classic-Russian-style.29 An arc from subversion to traditionalism, if such is the case, is hardly surprising: young people play, older ones teach life’s wisdom. But, as Sergey Kornev pointed out as early as 1997, Pelevin “combines para- doxically all the formal traits of postmodern literary production . . . with being a genuine Russian classical writer-ideologue like Tolstoy or Chernyshevsky.”30 In this light, he did not devolve from a daring postmodernist youngster into a modern-day “Tolstoyevsky” in his dotage. Rather, he was always a subversively experimental writer and an ideologue in the classical Russian mode. As Mikhail Berg argues, Pelevin’s shift from the postmodern is pragmatic: he “takes on the power fields of both mass culture and zones where radical practices function. Deconstruction of deconstruction produces an appearance of . . . positive ideology that forms cultural and symbolic capital appropriated 29 Thus, in Love for Three Zuckerbrins, Pelevin “explains his message through the example of Angry Birds, interprets through a Soviet cartoon, via an appeal to Ten Commandments, and so forth. . . . When the author writes in the last pages, ‘If I felt in myself the makings of a preacher . . . ,’ it is frightening to think what could have happened if he did not feel enough like a preacher now.” Varvara Babitskaia, “Liubov’ k trem tsukerbrinam Viktora Pelevina. Nas vsekh toshnit,” Vozdukh, September 12, 2014, https://daily.afisha.ru/archive/vozduh/ books/nas-vseh-toshnit-lyubov-k-trem-cukerbrinam-viktora-pelevina, accessed March 1, 2019. 30 Sergei Kornev, “Stolknovenie pustot: mozhet li postmodernism byt’ russkim i klassich- eskim,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 28 (1997): 244. Nikolai Chernyshevsky was a social critic and novelist, a dominant figure of the 1860s revolutionary movement in Russia. Copyrighted Material Copyright © Academic Studies Press, 2022  This is a sample - For the full text, please visit www.academicstudiespress.com Introduction xxiii by mass readers.”31 Yet one may be hesitant to reduce art to a power play. Why go through the cumbersome effort to deconstruct deconstruction to produce positive ideology when one can come up with a version of positive ideology directly? Furthermore, “mass readers” do not necessarily have trouble under- standing radical practices, but they may dislike or disagree with them. As to Pelevin’s later output, it has not been rewarded for expression of a “positive ideology” at all. There is a growing tendency at present, in the West as well as in Russia, to police writers for their political views. Reviews of Pelevin’s recent work have been marred by ideological reductionism—enlisting or dismissing him in accordance with one’s own political beliefs. Thought policing, whether of a conservative or liberal kind, does not perform literary analysis—it condemns and hands down a sentence. Such an approach is particularly reductive in the case of a cerebral, nuanced author like Pelevin. The liberal camp that wel- comed his satires of Soviet totalitarianism later disowned him for his mockery of neo-liberalism, political correctness, the West, and especially themselves.32 Conservatives have never been able to assimilate him, and with good reason. While his anti-Western, anti-PC stance may appeal to the right, his persistent acidic assessments of Russia do not.33 The fact that recent Peleviniana has been censured by conservatives and liberals alike is testimony to the author’ contin- ued ability to stimulate thought. Critical Debates: The West a) The Classics Pelevin’s work has been extensively translated into English and other world lan- guages, and he quickly gained a reputation in the West. His output of the 1990s was reviewed in mainstream Anglo-American periodicals. This raw bold new import from Russia was welcomed on the other side of the no longer existing 31 Mikhail Berg, Literaturokratiia. Problema pereraspredeleniia vlasti v literature (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2000), 300. 32 As in contra.ru/colta.ru (Love for Three Zuckerbrins), the gynecology of protest (Batman Apollo), or G.U.L.A.G. (S.N.U.F.F.). See, for example, Roman Arbitman’s critique of Pelevin’s anti-Western stance in S.N.U.F.F. Roman Arbitman, “Uronili v rechku miachik,” Laboratoriia fantastiki, December 19, 2011, https://fantlab.ru/work334698, accessed October 1, 2018. 33 For a rare (and to me unconvincing) attempt to assimilate Pelevin to right-wing ideology, see Vladimir Bondarenko, “Vampiry na sluzhbe piatoi imperii,” Zavtra 12 (March 2007): 696. Copyrighted Material Copyright © Academic Studies Press, 2022  This is a sample - For the full text, please visit www.academicstudiespress.com xxiv Companion to Victor Pelevin Iron Curtain.34 In the succeeding years, the Russian writer has elicited a good deal of debate in the Anglophone scholarship as well. It speaks to the richness of Pelevin’s art that contrastive readings of his oeuvre abound.35 Chapaev and the Void generated multiple in-depth investigations. As Angela Brintlinger demonstrates, Victor Pelevin (and Vladimir Makanin) build on the chronotope of the literary madhouse, juxtaposing the creative indi- vidual’s presence in the Soviet and post-Soviet world with his forced foray into the world of psychiatric medicine. In Chapaev and the Void Dr. Kanashnikov’s group therapy and the madhouse experiment with questions of self and collec- tive that are central to post-Soviet society: “In a post-collective society, what is the meaning and role of the individual? . . . How can healing take place? Who, in the end, is the hero?”36 Without a meaningful collective the hero is absent (empty), but Pelevin offers an exit: “In a pseudo-Buddhist turn, Pyotr chooses to retreat within that emptiness, into a solipsistic state that Pelevin names with a geographic pun: ‘Inner Mongolia’.”37 Like Brintlinger, Edith Clowes points out that constructions of the post-Soviet self constitute the novel’s central problematic. If Brintlinger grounds Chapaev and the Void in the context of the literary madhouse, Clowes 34 See, for example, Ken Kalfus, “Chicken Kiev. Surreal Stories from Russia Include One about Philosophical Poultry,” New York Times, December 7, 1997, http://www.nytimes. com/books/97/12/07/reviews/971207.07kalfust.html, accessed April 18, 2012; Jason Cowley, “Gogol a Go-Go,” The New York Times, January 23, 2000, https://www.nytimes. com/2000/01/23/magazine/gogol-a-go-go.html, accessed January 7, 2020; Joseph Mozur, “Victor Pelevin: Post-Sovism, Buddhism, and Pulp Fiction,” World Literature Today (Spring 2002): 59–67; Anastasia Edel, “Blurring the Real and the Fantastic: Victor Pelevin’s The Blue Lantern and Other Stories,” World Literature Today, (Winter, 2015), http://www.worldlit- eraturetoday.org/blog/blurring-real-and-fantastic-victor-pelevins-blue-lantern-and-other- stories, accessed May 5, 2018. See also Sally Laird, ed. Voices of Russian Literature: Interviews with Ten Contemporary Writers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). While the Russian reception of Peleviniana tends to take the form of journalistic reviews published closely on the heels of his texts, English-language criticism is dominated by academic articles that aim to be more analytical and less valuative. 35 The first Pelevin studies came out in the West in the late 1990s to early 2000s. See Sally Dalton-Brown, “Ludic Nonchalance or Ludicrous Despair? Viktor Pelevin and Russian Post- Modernist Prose,” Slavonic and East European Review 75, no. 2 (April 1997): 216–233; Keith Livers, “Bugs in the Body Politic: The Search for Self in Victor Pelevin’s The Life of Insects,” The Slavic and East European Journal 46, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 1–28; Gerald McCausland, “Viktor Olegovich Pelevin,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography: Russian Writers since 1980, ed. Marina Balina and Mark Lipovetsky (Detroit, MI: Gale Research Inc., 2003), 208–219. 36 Angela Brintlinger, “The Hero in the Madhouse: The Post-Soviet Novel Confronts the Soviet Past,” Slavic Review 63, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 54. 37 Ibid., 56. Copyrighted Material Copyright © Academic Studies Press, 2022  This is a sample - For the full text, please visit www.academicstudiespress.com Introduction xxv approaches it from the angle of parodying neo-Eurasianist philosophy. Each of the inmates in the psychiatric hospital is an allegorical component in the national-imperial psyche. The collective Russian psyche, “insofar as it exists, is in a state of crisis, full of the debris of Soviet ideology, police-state thuggish- ness, and representations of military grandeur that ended in dead boys coming home from the Afghan War in caskets.”38 The novel deconstructs the Russian national-imperial psyche to answer the question of why Russia is “in trouble.” It exposes the pitfalls of idealizing the “strong hand,” an idea promoted by the influential neo-Eurasianist philosopher Alexander Dugin. Like Brintlinger and Clowes, Boris Noordenbos addresses the ways Pelevin’s novel reflects on the confusion wrought by the Soviet Union’s disso- lution. For his part, he draws on trauma studies to analyze the reorganization of history in the novel. This argument sees Pelevin employing the narrator’s shock, amnesia and trauma and the confused historical plot issuing from them to reflect on the possibilities of collective mourning in post-Soviet Russia. The novel suggests “that the blank spaces of history and the disorientation pro- duced by political upheaval undermine attempts to piece together the dispa- rate parts of Russia’s twentieth-century past.”39 Along with Chapaev and the Void, Generation ‘П’ has attracted consider- able scholarly attention. Lyudmila Parts reads the post-perestroika cultural crisis as “symbolizing the demise of the intelligentsia.”40 Stephen Hutchings likewise examines the passing of the intelligentsia and literary culture in post-Soviet Russia. He emphasizes authorial humor and irony: “Tatarsky’s televisionary insights result not from epilepsy, but from magic mushrooms,” while “his secularized end is not a murder, but a television broadcast.”41 Notwithstanding all the humor and irony, I see Pelevin as taking the issue of 38 Edith Clowes, Russia on the Edge: Imagined Geographies and Post-Soviet Identity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 93. 39 Boris Noordenbos, “Shocking Histories and Missing Memories: Trauma in Viktor Pelevin’s Chapaev i pustota,” Russian Literature 85 (2016): 44. In-depth analyses of the novel also include Evgeny Pavlov, “Judging Emptiness: Reflections on the Post-Soviet Aesthetics and Ethics of Victor Pelevin’s Chapaev i pustota,” in Russian Literature in Translation, ed. Jan K. Lilly and Henrietta Mondry (Nottingham: Astra Press, 1999), 89–104; Rosalind Marsh, Literature, History and Identity in Post-Soviet Russia, 1991–2006 (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2006), 241–246; and Julia Vaingurt, “Freedom and the Reality of Others in Chapaev and the Void,” Slavic and East European Journal 62, no. 3 (Fall 2018): 466–482. 40 Lyudmila Parts, “Degradation of the Word or the Adventures of an Intelligent in Viktor Pelevin’s Generation ‘П’,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 46, nos. 3–4 (2004): 435. 41 Stephen Hutchings, Russian Literary Culture in the Camera Age: The Word as Image (London: Routledge, 2004), 180. Copyrighted Material Copyright © Academic Studies Press, 2022  This is a sample - For the full text, please visit www.academicstudiespress.com xxvi Companion to Victor Pelevin post-Soviet social and moral degradation in earnest. I consider Pelevin’s inter- rogation of techno-consumerism alongside mid- to late twentieth-century Western critiques of post-industrial capitalism, most centrally Marcuse’s con- cepts of the one-dimensional man and repressive tolerance, and poststructur- alist theories of simulation and hyper-reality à la Baudrillard. Pelevin’s novel ridicules the seductions of Western consumerism in early post-Soviet Russia, as Soviet hegemony is replaced by the regime of global capital.42 b) Central Issues The question of Pelevin’s relationship to postmodernism is one of the most fraught issues in the scholarship.43 Mark Lipovetsky discusses Pelevin in the wider context of Russian postmodernism. As he demonstrates, a novel kind of representation emerges in twentieth-century Russian literature—a paralog- ical mechanism (drawing on Lyotard’s notion of paralogy) termed “explosive aporia.” Russian postmodernist texts oscillate between a traditional cultural binarity indebted to literature-centrism, and the more recognizably postmod- ern deconstruction of binary oppositions. They do not resolve this conflict playfully in the manner of their Western counterparts, but harbor tension in the space of explosive aporias. So, in a novel such as Chapaev and the Void, the protagonist pursues a modernist ideal of personal freedom, but “this maximally accessible freedom equates with ‘self-erasure,’ the obliteration of ‘I’ and the reality to which this ‘I’ belongs and which it creates.”44 In The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, “there emerges a core incompatibility between the position of the postmodernist mediator with the escapist freedom of his former, modernist in their essence, protagonists.”45 42 Sofya Khagi, “From Homo Sovieticus to Homo Zapiens: Viktor Pelevin’s Consumer Dystopia,” The Russian Review 67, no 4 (October 2008): 559–579. 43 Sally Dalton-Brown described Pelevin’s work as “the most essentially postmodern of con- temporary Russian prose.” Dalton-Brown, “Ludic Nonchalance or Ludicrous Despair,” 216. 44 Mark Lipovetskii, Paralogii: transformatsii (post)modernistskogo diskursa v kul’ture 1920– 2000 godov (Moscow: Eksmo, 2008), 641. 45 Ibid., 677. Pelevin’s increasingly vexed attitude toward Western (that is, American) global economic and cultural hegemony, the radical left, the rule of PC, and so forth led Lipovetsky to interpret recent Peleviniana as exhibiting a conservative postmodern turn: “Pelevin’s Idyllium [in The Warden] . . . represents an imperial imaginary raised to the level of phil- osophical utopia. . . . Pelevin has, without realizing it himself, metamorphosed from the most mordant critic of the contemporary cultural-political regime into its promoter.” Mark Lipovetsky, “The Formal is Political,” 2016 AATSEEL Distinguished Professor Lecture: AATSEEL Keynote Address, Austin, TX, January 9, 2016, Slavic and East European Journal 60, no. 2 (2016): 187. See also idem, “Stranger than Fiction: The Fantasy Novels of Victor Copyrighted Material Copyright © Academic Studies Press, 2022