Companion to Victor Pelevin 9781644697771

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Companion to Victor Pelevin

COMPANIONS TO RUSSIAN LITERATURE

Series Editor Thomas Seifrid (University of Southern California, Los Angeles)

Companion to Victor Pelevin E dite d by Sofya Kh a g i

BOSTON 2022

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021949719 Copyright © Academic Studies Press, 2022 ISBN 9781644697757 ISBN 9781644697764 ISBN 9781644697771 ISBN 9781644697788

hardback paperback ebook PDF 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

Contents

Introduction Victor Pelevin: Life, Works, Critical Debates  Sofya Khagi, University of Michigan

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Part One: The Post-Soviet   1. The Early Years: Post-Soviet with a Capital “S” Michael Martin, University of Michigan

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Part Two: Space, Time, History   2. Space-Time Poetics in Chapaev and the Void24 Sofya Khagi, University of Michigan   3. Parody of Past and Present in Chapaev and the Void53 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’  Dylan Ogden, University of Michigan   6. Totalitarian Literature in Generation ‘П’ Meghan Vicks, University of Colorado, Boulder 

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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 Zuckerbrins186 Theodore Trotman, University of Chicago Appendix Select Publications by Victor Pelevin in Russian and English Index

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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 translations 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 cigarettes 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-sovelvet 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.

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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.

Introduction

with “Sorcerer Ignat and People,” featured pop-scientific articles and a horoscope 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 respectable 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 presidency, 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 appearance of his first story, Pelevin has accomplished much: he has chronicled the post-Soviet condition with photographic precision, anatomized global postmodernity, 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.

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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 mereshchilos’, 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.

Introduction

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 combined his studies as a part-time student with work as a journalist, editor, publisher, 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 shestipalyi”) captures in a microcosm much of his cosmology and narrative technique. 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.

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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 photographically 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 idiosyncratic 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 indeterminacy of human consciousness and its relationship to the external world, the blurring of the boundaries between waking life, dreams, and death, and alternative histories and selves. Among the collection’s stories, “The Prince of Gosplan” (“Prints gosplana”) 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.”

Introduction

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 exploration 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’ nasekomykh, 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 interconnected 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 glowworm 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.

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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, positioned 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.

Introduction

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 disintegrates. 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.

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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 businessperson 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 narrated 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 metamorphoses 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 aborting material reality). On the novel’s last page, A Huli breaks through the illusory 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 contemporaneity. 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.

Introduction

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 retrodetective 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 considerations: 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 fiction 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 downon-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 deception conducted by competing secret services and enabled by advanced technologies. “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).

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aircraft over Afghanistan. Skotenkov takes out drones over the Afghan desert by drawing verbal formulas in the sand that involve politically incorrect invectives 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. portrays 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, economically 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) hearkens 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 internet troll enamored of violent computer games and online pornography. One of the many victims of the suicide blast, Kesha (along with Karaev) is reincarnated 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 private 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-

Introduction

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 alternative 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 GermanAustrian doctor Franz Anton Mesmer, inventor of the theory of animal magnetism. 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 contemporary 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.

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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 groundbreaking 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 individual 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 characterized 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 significant 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 PostSoviet 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 metamorfozy,” 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.

Introduction

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 collection 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 failure 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 otechestvennykh 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-opelevine-put-vniz-lekciya-pervaya/chitat-onlayn/, accessed March 6, 2020.

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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 didacticism 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 paradoxically 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 klassicheskim,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 28 (1997): 244. Nikolai Chernyshevsky was a social critic and novelist, a dominant figure of the 1860s revolutionary movement in Russia.

Introduction

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 understanding 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 welcomed 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’ continued ability to stimulate thought.

Critical Debates: The West a) The Classics

Pelevin’s work has been extensively translated into English and other world languages, 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.

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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 individual’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 collective 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.worldliteraturetoday.org/blog/blurring-real-and-fantastic-victor-pelevins-blue-lantern-and-otherstories, 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 PostModernist 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.

Introduction

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 thuggishness, 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 dissolution. 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 produced by political upheaval undermine attempts to piece together the disparate parts of Russia’s twentieth-century past.”39 Along with Chapaev and the Void, Generation ‘П’ has attracted considerable 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.

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post-Soviet social and moral degradation in earnest. I consider Pelevin’s interrogation of techno-consumerism alongside mid- to late twentieth-century Western critiques of post-industrial capitalism, most centrally Marcuse’s concepts of the one-dimensional man and repressive tolerance, and poststructuralist 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 paralogical 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 postmodern 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 contemporary 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 philosophical 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

Introduction

Elana Gomel also explains Pelevin’s Russian postmodernism vis-à-vis Western postmodernism: “Neither an imitation nor a repudiation of Western postmodernism, Pelevin’s oeuvre represents a bold attempt to expand and modify such postmodern tropes as space, simulacrum, and fragmented subjectivity to respond to Russia’s unique national needs.”46 The end of the USSR marked the failure of the attempt to stop the contingency of time (the postmodern episteme is another such attempt). The fate of post-Soviet Russia demonstrates, however, that “history will not be stopped.”47 In my work I view Pelevin as an artist who consummately deploys postmodern devices while critiquing postmodernity and postmodernism as social and cultural phenomena. Consistently anti-establishment, he directs his subversive thrust at postmodernism when, preoccupied in its more robust forms with the problem of freedom, it grows authoritarian itself. He has his own robust social, metaphysical, and ethical credos, and he deploys them throughout with a consummate sense of irony and play. Pelevin’s “sermons” and irony, accordingly, do not cancel each other out but coexist in a symbiotic relationship as earnest questioning.48 Several other strands—including Pelevin’s take on posthumanism, conspiratorial thinking, and ethics—have drawn critical attention. Alexander Etkind interprets Pelevin’s monstrous elements as stemming from the impossibility of properly mourning the dead in post-Soviet society, while Dina Khapaeva reads his non-human characters as reflective of “the crisis of the ideology of the Enlightenment, . . . disappointment in the theory of progress, scientific objectivity and scientific rationalism.”49 I approach Pelevin’s posthumanist

46 47 48 49

Pelevin Reveal the Reality of Modern Russia,” The Calvert Journal, January 20, 2016, https:// www.calvertjournal.com/articles/show/5305/the-fantasy-novels-of-victor-pelevinreveal-the-reality-modern-russia, accessed March 5, 2020; and idem [Mark Lipovetskii], “Psevdomorfoza: Reaktsionnyi postmodernism kak problema,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 3 (2018), https://www.nlobooks.ru/magazines/novoe_literaturnoe_obozrenie/151/article/19759/, accessed January 14, 2020. Elana Gomel, “Viktor Pelevin and Literary Postmodernism in Post-Soviet Russia,” Narrative 21, no. 3 (October 2013): 321. Ibid., 320. Sofya Khagi, “Incarceration, Alibi, Escape? Victor Pelevin’s Art of Irony,” Russian Literature 76, no. 4 (November 2014): 381–406. Alexander Etkind, Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), 211. See also idem, “Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied: Magical Historicism in Contemporary Russian Fiction,” Slavic Review 68, no. 3 (Fall 2009): 631–658, and Mark Lipovetsky and Alexander Etkind, “The Salamander’s Return: The Soviet Catastrophe and the Post-Soviet Novel,” Russian Studies

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scenarios using the prism of biopolitics. His biotic schemes express themselves in a stable associative chain: humans—animals—biomass—a source of energy (blood or oil)—money. This scenario of dehumanization (humans turned animals/biomass) offers an example of a posthumanism interpreted negatively, as the justification and spread of human degradation and dehumanization.50 Eliot Borenstein and Keith Livers examine Pelevin’s play on the conspiratorial underpinning of historical events. For Borenstein, Pelevin “is reluctant to abandon systemic thinking entirely, creating elaborate conspiracies even as he lampoons conspiratorial paranoia.”51 As he observes, when Pelevin “closed out the Yeltsyn era in his novel Homo Zapiens (Generation ‘П’) with the casual revelation that the entire Kremlin leadership was generated by CGI, readers could be forgiven for idly wishing that their next president would be produced by Pixar.”52 As Livers demonstrates, Generation ‘П’ and Empire V “portray twenty-first century Moscow as the site of an apocalyptic endgame where various conspiratorial societies vie for domination.”53 While Pelevin draws on conspiratorial thinking, he maintains a degree of ironic distance from it. Pelevin’s ethical turn became the focus of the first scholarly forum on his work, “Victor Pelevin, Then and Now,” published in the Fall 2018 issue of Slavic and East European Journal. The contributors aimed to synthesize Peleviniana in its diachronic development, and posited his intermittent but palpable shift from metaphysical solipsism to a growing ethical concern for others. Julia Vaingurt fleshes out the connection between aesthetics and ethics in Literature 46, no. 4 (2010): 6–48. Dina Khapaeva, Koshmar: literatura i zhizn’ (Moscow: Tekst, 2010), 293. 50 Sofya Khagi, “The Monstrous Aggregate of the Social: Toward Biopolitics in Victor Pelevin’s Work,” The Slavic and East European Journal 55, no. 3 (Fall 2011): 439–459. On Pelevin’s take on posthumanism, see also Keith Livers, “Is There Humanity in Posthumanity? Viktor Pelevin’s S.N.U.F.F,” Slavic and East European Journal 62, no. 3 (Fall 2018): 503–522. On The Sacred Book of the Werewolf as reflecting Russia’s conversion into a petro-state, see “Oboroten Spectres: Lycanthropy, Neoliberalism and New Russia in Victor Pelevin,” in Sharae Deckard, Nicholas Lawrence, Neil Lazarus, Graeme Macdonald, Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee, Benita Parry, and Stephen Shapiro, Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015), 96–114. 51 Eliot Borenstein, “Survival of the Catchiest: Memes and Postmodern Russia,” Slavic and East European Journal 48, no 3 (Fall 2004): 477. 52 Idem, Plots against Russia: Conspiracy and Fantasy after Socialism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019), 60. 53 Keith Livers, “The Tower or the Labyrinth: Conspiracy, Occult, and Empire-Nostalgia in the Work of Viktor Pelevin and Aleksandr Prokhanov,” The Russian Review 69, no. 3 ( July 2010): 478. See also idem, Conspiracy Culture: Post-Soviet Paranoia and the Russian Imagination (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020).

Introduction

in the metaphysical quest of Pyotr Pustota.54 She argues that the structure of Chapaev and the Void points to the rescuing presence of another consciousness, and the necessity of incorporating one’s essential relatedness with others into the core of one’s spiritual life. Keith Livers examines S.N.U.F.F. to work out Pelevin’s answer to the question, “What does it mean to be human in a posthuman age?”55 Livers shows that, in the world of S.N.U.F.F., egocentric human characters fail to exhibit morality and an awareness of others’ humanity. It is within the Dostoevskian kenotic self-sacrifice for the benefit of others and the Tolstoyan notion of “zero self ” that S.N.U.F.F.’s subhuman characters are able to secure a path toward personhood.56 I contend that Pelevin’s interrogation and frustration of paradigms of popular alternative history in his 1990s output assumes a pronounced ethical turn in later texts like Love for Three Zuckerbrins, where he translates the generic clichés of alternative history into metaphysical and ethical issues.57 His version of the multiverse in Love for Three Zuckerbrins is predicated not on complicated time-travel technology or pragmatic reasoning, but on individual freedom and moral choice, thus returning historical questions to the larger ethical domain. In the first English-language book-length treatment of the author, I explore Pelevin’s sustained Dostoevsky-like reflections on the philosophical question of freedom.58 This study considers how Pelevin’s complex oeuvre and worldview are shaped by the idea that contemporary social conditions pervert the very premise of freedom. He uses provocative and imaginative prose to model different systems of unfreedom, vividly illustrating how the 54 Vaingurt, “Freedom and the Reality of Others in Chapaev and the Void, 466–482. Vaingurt comes into dialogue with Lipovetsky who considers The Sacred Book of the Werewolf— where Pelevin incorporates the idea of love for others as a necessary component of individual search for freedom—as his turning point toward ethics. 55 Livers, “Is There Humanity in Posthumanity? Viktor Pelevin’s S.N.U.F.F.,” 503–522. 56 Among Pelevin’s works of the previous decade, S.N.U.F.F. has gained attention with its ethical queries, posthumanist issues, and a critique of Western cultural imperialism. In Borenstein’s formulation, the novel is “a satire of the relationship between imperialist Westernized powers and the second- and third-world objects of their manipulation, condescension, and aggression.” Eliot Borenstein, “News Russia’s Alien Nations. Off the Reservation,” https:// jordanrussiacenter.org/news/off-the-reservation/#.YQu0YecpDIU, accessed August 5, 2021. Alexei Lalo, likewise, explores Pelevin’s critique of Western imperialism and political correctness. Alexei Lalo, “New Trends in Russian Intellectual Anti-Americanism: The Strange Case of Viktor Pelevin’s Novel S.N.U.F.F,” Slavonica 20, no. 1 (2014): 34–44. 57 Sofya Khagi, “Alternative Historical Imagination in Viktor Pelevin,” Slavic and East European Journal 62, no. 3 (Fall 2018): 483–502. 58 Idem, Pelevin and Unfreedom: Poetics, Politics, Metaphysics (Chicago, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2021).

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world today uses hyper-commodification and technological manipulation to promote human degradation and social deadlock. Pelevin holds up a mirror to the ways social control (now covert, yet far more efficient) masquerades as choice; how eagerly we accept, even welcome, our enslavement by the technoconsumer system. He reflects on how commonplace discursive markers of freedom (like the free market) are in fact misleading and disempowering. Under this comfortably self-occluding bondage, the subject loses all power of selfdetermination—the system altogether obliterates the human as an agent of free will and ethical judgment. And yet, as the book argues, however circumscribed and ironically qualified, Pelevin also holds onto the emancipatory potential of ethics and even an emancipatory humanism.

Objectives and Layout of this Companion Companion to Victor Pelevin is a collaborative undertaking by a group of current and recent graduate students at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (Departments of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Comparative Literature, and History), the University of Chicago (Slavic Languages and Literatures), and the University of Colorado, Boulder (Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures). The volume concurrently pursues scholarly and pedagogical objectives. It provides a resource to scholars, teachers, and students, including how best to teach Pelevin to university-level students, and which critical debates invite further investigation. We cover a broad time span and strive to pay due attention to the philosophical and aesthetic complexities of Pelevin’s oeuvre in its development from the early post-Soviet years to the second decade of the present millennium. The Companion combines thematic and chronological approaches, and is structured as a cluster of chapters on major themes running across multiple texts from early to late Peleviniana: The Post-Soviet (Part One), Space, Time, History (Part Two), Simulation and Mind Control (Part Three), Metamorphosis and Utopia (Part Four). The Introduction presents an overview of Pelevin’s thirty-year career for new initiates, as well as sections on the main debates and central issues in the author’s work as a guide to those who want to probe Peleviniana in more depth. The literature review functions as a set of reference points for further research. Each chapter is structured around a specific theme and argument and integrates original scholarship with wide coverage of extant Pelevin studies. The contributors draw on a range of methodologies and combine informative/orientating and theoretically inflected readings. The

Introduction

eight chapters cover nearly all of Pelevin’s main works and all Peleviniana currently available in English. There is an extra emphasis on Chapaev and the Void and Generation ‘П’ since these two texts define most of Pelevin’s signature moves and central themes, and are also more likely to be taught than others (with the exception of Omon Ra). Throughout the Companion, we refer to Pelevin’s less known texts, in part, as a service to those who cannot read Russian. In the same vein, we supply cultural glosses to that part of the audience without specialized knowledge of Russian and Russian literature, and offer a grounding in postmodern culture that helps make Pelevin accessible for and relevant to our audience. Michael Martin’s “The Early Years: Post-Soviet with a Capital ‘S’” provides context and orientation on the initial steps of Pelevin’s literary career. The chapter’s primary focus is the short story collection The Blue Lantern and the novella Omon Ra (with additional material on The Life of Insects) within the context of their relationship to the Soviet literary canon. Martin considers Pelevin’s early writings as attempts to process the Soviet collapse by deconstructing the generic and social norms of official Soviet literature, particularly the Socialist Realist bildungsroman and the utopian novel. Pelevin’s early work transforms these well-worn conventions in uncanny ways, and, in so doing, reveals authorial discontent with post-Soviet society’s inability to escape the oppressive ideological legacy of its past. It demonstrates the tension present in times of monumental change and offers a solution: creating an individual self, free of ideological burdens. The focus of my contribution, “Space-Time Poetics in Chapaev and the Void,” is the novel’s non-linear spaces and warped timelines. I introduce the reader to a broad range of spatial and temporal models that loom large in Pelevin’s novel and argue that, alongside its discursive engagement of spacetime theories, the novel develops a poetics of non-Euclidian and non-Kantian spatial-temporal modeling. The novel draws on and transforms notions such as Nietzsche’s Eternal Return, Saṃsāra, and Zhuangzi’s butterfly dream (in the Buddhist and Daoist tradition), the Kantian categorical imperative and spacetime as a priori and Freud’s temporal logic of dreams. Pelevin experiments with an assortment of warped space-times that include: circular/recurrent visions of individual and collective existence, dreamscapes, psychic landscapes in flux and landscapes of collective visualizations, train imagery and non-linear miseen-abyme, spatial metaphors of the transcendental, and warped otherworldly (benign and malignant) realms. This “disturbational” poetics dislocates Pustota’s and the reader’s linear Weltanschauung and highlights the protagonist’s journey toward liberation and enlightenment.

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Christopher Fort’s “Parody of Past and Present in Chapaev and the Void” grounds the novel in Socialist Realism and the Soviet Union’s foundational myths. Pelevin parodies the SR canon with inversions of Dmitry Furmanov’s novel Chapaev. By making dreams the novel’s central trope, he parodically targets the SR hero who must be “woken” to a proper revolutionary consciousness. Unlike them, Pustota achieves freedom not by awakening to an “objective reality” but by becoming conscious of his power to create his own reality. Fort reads the novel as one in which satire of Soviet myths sits side by side with satire of the new myths around which Russians were attempting to structure their post-Soviet existence. Alexander McConnell’s “Masking the Void, Voiding the Mask: Victor Pelevin and the Performance of History” links the reading of Chapaev and the Void to the writer’s major preoccupations with disguise and history. In McConnell’s reading, Pelevin’s historical sensibility can be best appreciated through the lens of performance, understood as both the ways in which people of the past—or “historical actors”—consciously perform their roles, and the means by which literary texts perform fictionalized renditions of history. He conceptualizes Pelevin’s approach to the past as “hyper-history,” a designation connoting the expansiveness of his spatio-temporal purview and the performative character of his representations of historical phenomena. For Pelevin, performance and theatricality serve as channels for destructive forces, which can be counteracted by exposing the theatrical act. McConnell broadens his analysis of the 1996 classic to discussing the performance of history in Pelevin’s 1990s short stories and novels of the 2000s and 2020s such as Empire V and The Invincible Sun. “The Battle for Your Mind: Transformation of Western Social Theory in Generation ‘П’” by Dylan Ogden maps out the ways the novel engages in philosophical discourse with several major Western theorists of modern media and capitalist culture, including Baudrillard, Debord, Marcuse, Jameson, and Deleuze and Guattari. The three main topics Ogden deals with are a) the contentions around the status of “reality” in modern society; b) theoretical conceptions of desire and its relationship with capitalism; and c) whether it is possible to resist the inherent oppression of modern capitalist society. Ogden’s study presents a broad overview of the theoretical terrain in which the novel operates, while pointing to the ways Pelevin adapts, critiques, and satirizes elements of various theoretical projects in nuanced and playful ways. He extends his discussion of the turn-of-the-century Pelevin classic novel to works of the 2000s and 2010s such as The Helmet of Horror, Empire V, and Batman Apollo.

Introduction

Meghan Vicks’s contribution, “Totalitarian Literature in Generation ‘П’,” draws connections to debates about the decline of literature commonplace in the first decade of post-Soviet Russia, as well as to the rise of state television media that propagates cynicism as the latest answer to “What is to be done?”59 Vicks identifies multiple intertexts in Generation ‘П’ and argues that literature-centrism has not ended in post-Soviet Russia (nor has it been replaced with consumerism). Rather, in the post-Soviet world, the implicit project of literature-centrism has been absolutely realized. The intelligentsia, with its literature-centrism, achieves total (totalitarian) control in the novel. Vicks continues her discussion of the problem of totalitarian literature by identifying examples of it in Empire V and T. Grace Mahoney’s “Transformative Reading for Tailless Monkeys: Metamorphoses in The Sacred Book of the Werewolf” explores the leitmotif of shapeshifting in a wide range of texts across Pelevin’s career, from early short stories such as “A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia” to works of the late 2000s like “The Hall of the Singing Caryatids.” Her central text, however, is The Sacred Book of the Werewolf. For the characters in these books, she contends that metamorphosis can mean liberation not only from the bounds of sex and gender, but from their species, their bodies, and the worlds they inhabit. Metamorphosis in Pelevin is not restricted to were-creatures such as the protagonists of the core novel but unfolds at a variety of registers to present a fluidity of being and the distillation of the spirit from the body. As Mahoney shows, metamorphosis in The Sacred Book of the Werewolf and elsewhere points to the dynamic nature of all things, not only of language, society, and time, but also of the body, the nature of love, and life itself. The last chapter, by Theodore Trotman, “The Mythic and the Utopian: Visions of the Future through the Lens of S.N.U.F.F. and Love for Three Zuckerbrins,” explores the intersection of myth and utopia in these two more recent Pelevin novels. Trotman argues that S.N.U.F.F. shows remnants of Soviet culture, in the form of its dreams and mythologies, as having found a new purpose and direction. The way this novel orients itself in relation to the Soviet past indicates that it is more than experimentation in a genre with a long cultural history in Russia; it is also a redirection of Soviet-utopian dreams for a post-utopian society. To whatever degree post-Soviet Russia is also post-utopian, that classification does not preclude a utopian imagination of the future. Instead, it removes the limitation of ideal futurescapes to the Soviet space. 59 What is to Be Done? is the title of Chernyshevsky’s 1863 novel.

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Pelevin then shifts his tone in Love for Three Zuckerbrins, apparently abandoning the hope for a positive utopian imagination. The contributors to the Companion hope that it will offer a useful resource to scholars, teachers, and students, and will prompt further inquiry into Pelevin’s intellectually stimulating and socially prescient work.

CHAPTER 1

The Early Years: Post-Soviet with a Capital “S” MICHAEL MARTIN, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

T

he very first effort of Victor Pelevin’s literary career—the short story collection The Blue Lantern and the novel Omon Ra—took shape in specific relation to the Soviet literary canon. Pelevin’s early writings may be read as attempts to process the Soviet collapse by adapting the generic and structural norms of Soviet literature to the existential and ideological crises of post-Soviet space. These early works present uncanny transformations of those well-worn models as the author develops his philosophy of subjective reality. They reveal Pelevin’s discontent with post-Soviet society’s reliance on collectivist ideology and with people’s inability to look inward to process the turbulence of their new life. Victor Pelevin’s writing came to the global literary stage almost immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union. He had published stories while working as a journalist in Moscow, but was far from an established literary figure and virtually unknown outside of Eastern Europe in the early 1990s. But when his first short story collection and novella came out, he was quickly hailed as one of the most experimental authors of his generation. Released from the constraints of the old state-sponsored literary establishment, Pelevin distinguished himself in his ability to appeal to the modern intelligentsia without speaking down to the (now post-)Soviet masses hungry for literature free of censorship. As Rajendra Chitnis describes it, he “overcame the distinction between elite

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and popular culture.”1 Pelevin’s reputation quickly grew abroad as well, with writers, scholars, and interviewers racing to introduce his work.2 The short story collection The Blue Lantern (Sinii fonar’, 1991) and the novella Omon Ra (1992) show Pelevin straddling the border between Soviet and post-Soviet culture, articulating his views on communism’s legacy while also anticipating his later work’s critique of capitalism, Buddhist themes and narrative absurdity.3 Much of this early output is rooted in the thematic and structural norms of the Soviet past, but it also looks forward—towards the post-Soviet future—and around—at the society still in the process of adjusting to its new circumstances. Pelevin and his contemporaries, members of the last Soviet generation, were forced to confront new realities while still reeling from the political and ideological vacuum left by the collapse of communism. What we see is not merely Pelevin’s reflections on the Soviet collapse, but his attempt to speak to his transitional time. In the stories of The Blue Lantern, Pelevin constructs microcosms of post-Soviet space that present the reader with a concentrated vision of reality. While these spaces are multifaceted and thematically diverse, they are rooted in the aesthetics of the Soviet Union’s literary standard—Socialist Realism. Taking familiar ideas, plots, and generic structures as the framework for his worlds and placing those familiar paradigms in new contexts, Pelevin’s early work facilitates a reexamination of the past by challenging the reader’s understanding of literature, which in turn leads to an interrogation of extra-textual reality. This is how Pelevin critiques the ideological chaos after the Soviet collapse—with some characters preaching fatalistic acceptance of doom, others clinging desperately to old norms, and still others placing blind faith in alternative visions of the future, including the specious temptations of the West. The inability of collectively held ideology to offer viable answers to post-Soviet uncertainties is the dominant theme in these early works. The only hope for Pelevin’s characters, then, lies in their ability to achieve personal enlightenment and free themselves of the need for ideological certainty. 1 Rajendra A. Chitnis, Literature in Post-Communist Russia and Eastern Europe (New York: Routledge, 2004), 142. 2 Pelevin’s work is “the standard by which we know post-Soviet literature.” Clark Blaise, “Interview with Viktor Pelevin,” in The Writers Come from Around the World, University of Iowa, audio, 1:04. 3 Victor Pelevin, The Blue Lantern, trans. Andrew Bromfield (Cambridge: New Directions Books, 1996). Originally published in Russian, Viktor Pelevin, Sinii fonar’ (Moscow: Tekst, 1991). Idem, Omon Ra, trans. Andrew Bromfield (Cambridge, MA: New Directions Books, 1994). Originally published in Russian, Viktor Pelevin, Omon Ra (Moscow: Tekst, 1992).

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In Omon Ra, Pelevin continues to rely on Soviet literary forms, this time in a concentrated attempt to confront the Soviet past, to expose the contradictions of Soviet life and by doing so, move past it. The novella is rooted in heroic pilot stories but in the course of the action the author shows the absurdity of the Soviet system and pushes his hero to find his own path forward. Together, these works’ transformations of well-worn conventions and characters help turn the reader’s critical eye toward the problem of being “post-Soviet,” in particular, the urge to cohesively define lived reality in limited ideological terms. Like The Blue Lantern, Omon Ra expresses the author’s philosophy that lived experience is subjective and demands an inward-facing worldview and individual freedom. These two works embody Pelevin’s early career, though his tendencies towards the reexamination of Soviet forms and themes are also reflected in many of his other works of this period.4

The Blue Lantern: Post-Soviet Microcosms The Blue Lantern was Pelevin’s first major work as a writer of fiction. Although almost half of the stories had been published prior to the entire collection coming out, for most readers this was their first encounter with the author.5 These short stories show Pelevin developing his poetics, and their thematic and narrative elements also anticipate elements of his mature output. The stories are rooted in the generic conventions of Socialist Realism, which, while not a static category, displays certain distinguishing characteristics that set it apart from other literary genres. Chief among these, as Katerina Clark has observed, is a dual register through which “the novel depicts what is (i.e., uses the realist mode) and simultaneously what ought to be (i.e., idealizes reality in the utopian or mythic mode).”6 Such an approach is inherently didactic, demonstrating to readers the importance of their actions in the grander scheme of history and guiding them toward correct decisions. The Socialist Realist plot is also frequently built around a pivotal rite of passage, with the 4 See Victor Pelevin, Yellow Arrow, trans. Andrew Bromfield (Cambridge, MA: New Directions Books, 2009). Originally published in Russian, Viktor Pelevin, Zheltaia strela (Moscow: Vagrius, 1993). Idem, Life of Insects, trans. Andrew Bromfield (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998). Originally published in Russian, Viktor Pelevin, Zhizn’ nasekomykh, Znamia 4 (1993): 6–65. 5 “News from Nepal,” “The Life and The Adventures of Shed Number 12,” and “The Blue Lantern” were all published in 1991. 6 Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000), 37.

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protagonist making a heroic sacrifice to achieve their goal, in the course of which they experience a moment of political awakening that allows them to succeed.7 Such pivotal moments correspond to broader ideological victories; as Clark notes, “even the climactic moment of passage is but a shadow of the ‘form’ of the passage into Communism.”8 The Socialist Realist novel thus calls into question the divide between a heavily mythologized history and an individual’s developmental plot, mapping personal narrative onto the ideological interpretation of the Soviet Union’s overarching vision. In this way, Socialist Realist novels create microcosms where the struggles and triumphs of individuals are conflated with those of the collective. Boris Polevoi’s novella The Story of a Real Man (Povest’ o nastoiashchem cheloveke, 1947) is a stark example of Socialist Realism upon which Pelevin builds his early literary forays.9 Polevoi, who worked as a journalist during the Great Patriotic War, recounts the story of Alexei Maresiev, a real Soviet pilot who was shot down and made an emergency landing near Lake Seliger in Tver Oblast. He had to crawl fifty kilometers to reach his comrades. His legs, seriously injured in the crash, had to be amputated, but Maresiev learned to walk with prosthetics and returned to flying before the end of the war. His story fits into the genre of Socialist Realism. Many of the genre’s exemplary works were based on real events, as is the case here, but Polevoi makes several adjustments to conform to the literary norms of the genre. A key addition is the character of Commissar Vorobyov, another patient in the field hospital where Maresiev was recovering, who helps the hero overcome his injuries by assuring him of his worth as a soldier and his importance to the Soviet cause. Vorobyov plays the role of an ideological mentor who transforms Maresiev from a simple, good-natured young man into a true Soviet hero. We can also observe generic conventions in the way Maresiev’s story is juxtaposed with the plight of the Soviet Union as a whole. The novella concludes with Maresiev sitting in contemplation of how his own accomplishments pale in comparison to those of his motherland. Maresiev’s story merges with a collective vision of history. Pelevin’s work draws on the microcosmic representations of Socialist Realism to examine post-Soviet reality, and in this he continues a trajectory established by experimental postmodern writers of the late Soviet period such 7 8 9

Ibid, 167–168. Ibid, 176. Boris Polevoi, The Story of a Real Man, trans. Joseph Fineberg (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1973; reprint n.p.: Dead Authors Society, 2017). Published in Russian, Povest’ o nastoiashchem cheloveke (Moscow: Oktiabr’, 1947).

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as Venedikt Erofeev, Andrei Bitov, and Vasily Aksyonov. Their stories were modelled on Socialist Realism but transformed it to examine Soviet absurdities, inconsistencies, and foibles. Pelevin also draws on a mode of writing Edith Clowes has labeled “meta-utopian,” that is, it uses utopian forms to offer social critiques that echo the works of modernists like Evgeny Zamyatin and Andrei Platonov, often referred to as dystopian authors.10 Like these earlier writers, Pelevin’s target is the ideology of the collective that Socialist Realism was meant to inspire. But rather than merely deconstruct this ideal, Pelevin counterbalances its collapse with the possibility of individual growth. Cultural critic Alexander Genis has argued that Pelevin’s literary voice can be described as constructive postmodernism: “Pelevin does not destroy: he builds. Using the same fragments of the Soviet myth as Sorokin, he constructs both subject matter and concepts.”11 This constructivism separates Pelevin from many of his fellow postmodernist writers. Pelevin explores ideologies in effect, but, whereas Socialist Realist characters are mapped onto the broader schema of Soviet progress and are presented as models for the reader to follow, Pelevin develops a critical view of the doctrines his characters represent, showing their instability and shortcomings. Pelevin challenges the notion of an overarching ideology, whether that be the communist utopianism articulated in Socialist Realist literature or idealization of the West that has taken hold in post-Soviet political and journalistic discourse. He deconstructs the tropes of Socialist Realism, replacing the genre’s now meaningless moralizing with striving towards individual growth. This “transfiguration of simulacra into a reality of individual freedom,” as Mark Lipovetsky phrases it, is a repeated theme that ties the collection together.12 The first story in the collection, “News from Nepal” (“Vesti iz Nepala”), establishes Pelevin as a surrealist and fantasy-driven author.13 The main character, an unremarkable factory supervisor named Lyubochka, leads a dismally 10 Edith Clowes, Russian Experimental Fiction: Resisting Ideology after Utopia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 4. Clowes does not specifically mention Pelevin. 11 Alexander A. Genis, “Borders and Metamorphoses: Viktor Pelevin in the Context of PostSoviet Literature,” in Russian Postmodernism: New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture, ed. Mikhail N. Epstein, Alexander A. Genis and Slobodanka M. Vladiv-Glover (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015), Kindle edition, location 5246. Genis is referring here to the Russian author Vladimir Sorokin (1955–). 12 Mark Lipovetsky, “Russian Literary Postmodernism in the 1990s,” The Slavonic and East European Review 79, no. 1 ( January 2001): 47. 13 Some have pointed to this story to label Pelevin a magical realist writer. See Alexandra Berlina, “Russian Magical Realism and Pelevin as its Exponent,” CLCWeb: Comparative

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ordinary life. After her boss chastises her for slacking, she sets off to verify that an innovation supposedly devised by a worker would save time cutting tin. As her day progresses, the uncanny slowly seeps into the story. She has bizarre conversations with her coworkers, senses strange reactions among the laborers, and eventually discovers a mysterious pamphlet titled “Katmandu: The Land of Many Faces” tucked into her shirt-pocket. The document tells of a sect of people living in the Nepalese capital called the Seekers of Conviction, who engage in intense acts of contemplation to “achieve a realization of human life as it really is.”14 This sets up a contrast with Lyubochka and her colleagues, who are so wrapped up in their senseless tasks that they do not realize their reality is a lie. Only when they hear an announcement on the radio proclaiming their fate, do the shocked workers grasp in horror that they are already dead. They are covered in horrible wounds that they had perceived as mere articles of clothing, and their day-to-day factory jobs are a manifestation of hell. The story ends with the workers frantically trying to escape while the radio announcer drones on, lamenting the “horrors of Soviet death.”15 The story’s setting and conflict are characteristic of the Soviet Realist factory novel, works like Valentin Kataev’s Time Forward (Vremia, vpered!, 1932) and Fyodor Gladkov’s Cement (Tsement, 1925), but without fetishization of industriousness and physical labor.16 In Pelevin’s factory the workers’ tasks are ill-defined, their “innovations” comical, and their only aspiration is to pass the time in peace. There is no sense of self-awareness among the characters until the end, when the possibility of escape from the mundane shifts to a need to escape from the horrors of death. This revelation is reflected in the final, desperate scramble of Liubochka and her coworkers trying to leave only for the tale to return us to its beginning.17 The closed loop of the narrative shows the futility of these attempts at escape. They are stuck in a Soviet hell, unable to change or develop in any significant way. With this, the author offers a blunt metaphor for the nature of Soviet life. Literature and Culture 11, no. 4 (2009), https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent. cgi?article=1561&context=clcweb. 14 Pelevin, The Blue Lantern, 14. 15 Ibid., 20. 16 Valentin Kataev, Time, Forward!, trans. Charles Malamuth (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1995). Originally published in Russian, Vremia, vpered! (Moscow: Krasnaia nov’, 1932). Fyodor Gladkov, Cement, trans. A. S. Arthur (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1994). Originally published in Russian, Fedor Gladkov, Tsement (Moscow: Krasnaia nov’, 1925). 17 Pelevin, The Blue Lantern, 20.

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“News from Nepal” introduces one of the most important themes in Pelevin’s oeuvre, that of escape.18 Characters live in a world dominated by rules or ideals, and their ability to escape hinges on their ability to reject those imposed notions and think for themselves. Their moments of self-realization are comparable to the rites of passage in Socialist Realist literature: it is not merely that characters change, but their change is predicated on dramatic enlightenment. In “Hermit and Six Toes” (“Zatvornik i shestipalyi”), “MidGame” (“Mittel’shpil’”) and “The Life and Adventures of Shed Number 12” (“Zhizn’ i prikliucheniia saraia nomer 12”), these escapes are possible through self-improvement or self-discovery. In the remainder of the stories, the path to escape is less obvious. In “Crystal World” (“Khrustal’nyi mir”), for instance, two officers patrolling the streets of St. Petersburg on the night of the October Revolution escape the tedium of their job by taking cocaine and other drugs. Although this may seem like a false escape, it is valid for Pelevin because it rests on the soldiers’ personal decisions. “Nika” continues Pelevin’s critical examination of shared reality and brings it into the realm of the romantic. The story is unique in its deceptiveness, demonstrating Pelevin’s linguistic mastery and ability to play with the reader.19 The narrator is an infatuated lover of the story’s eponymous character, Nika. Eventually she spurns him for another, and he leaves his apartment in spite, returning weeks later to find her gone. Seeing her outside one day, he tries to coerce her to return to him, but she is attacked and viciously killed by a German shepherd. In the last sentence of the story, Pelevin reveals his hand: Nika, it turns out, is the narrator’s cat.20 The narrator of “Nika” is an unstable character, oscillating between acceptance of his dependency on Nika’s love and assertion of his individuality. In 18 The theme of escape, either physical or psychological, appears in every story in the collection. In four of the stories a literal escape is the main narrative axis along which the plot moves. Sally Dalton-Brown has identified the impossibility of breaking free from one’s material reality as a recurring motif in Russian postmodernist fiction, and this is certainly true of Pelevin. Sally Dalton-Brown, “Ludic Nonchalance or Ludicrous Despair? Victor Pelevin and Russian Postmodernist Prose,” The Slavonic and East European Review 75, no. 2 (1997): 216–233. 19 “Nika” and “Hermit and Six Toes” are both notable examples of Pelevin’s adoption of Gogolian estrangement, that is, the presenting of an object in unusual terms so the audience is able to picture it in a different way. For a more detailed definition of estrangement, see Victor Shklovsky, “Art as a Technique,” in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, ed. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1965). 20 Pelevin, The Blue Lantern, 104.

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the end, he makes the fatal mistake of forgoing his inward-looking consciousness and imparting value to his life only through his “love.” This portrayal is reinforced by the commonalities the narrator displays with the narrators of Vladimir Nabokov and Ivan Bunin, men who have also fallen into an obsessive, unrequited love. These references make the effect on readers that much greater when the rug is pulled out from under them and the real love object is revealed.21 The narrator’s obsessive tendencies, clearly modelled on the narrator of Nabokov’s Lolita (1955), Humbert Humbert, are manifest in Nika’s image taking over his life: “When I thought about it, almost every book and every poem was dedicated to Nika, whatever she might be called and whatever form she might assume.”22 Like Nabokov, to whom Pelevin’s has been repeatedly compared, Pelevin traps the reader inside the mind of a character completely overtaken by his obsession with their ideal of another person, even when repeatedly faced with an alternative reality that defies this perception. This encounter exposes the contradiction between “the ideas of real and unreal with fluidity and unexpectedness,” ultimately demolishing the barriers between these and presenting the self as the only functioning source of reality’s definition.23 Yet by the narrator’s own admission, his feelings for Nika are not entirely sincere, but are instead the result of wanting “to stop being myself—that is, to stop existing at all.”24 His infatuation stems from his discomfort with his own self. In “The Life and Adventures of Shed Number 12” Pelevin reimagines the Soviet literary tradition to once again impress on the reader the importance of maintaining one’s sense of self. Adventure novels were a popular staple of Soviet literature, especially among young readers.25 Elements of Socialist Realist children’s literature are prevalent in the story, most clearly in its straightforward moral conflict. “The Life and Adventures” presents Shed Number 12 as a conscious being who resents being converted from storage for bikes into a place full of brining vats. It manages through sheer willpower to set itself ablaze and free itself from the despair its new contents have brought. The destruction is a liberating experience, achieving the shed’s dream of rebirth as a wooden 21 Ol’ga Bogdanova, Sergei Kibal’nik, and Liudmila Safronova, Literaturnye strategii Viktora Pelevina (St. Petersburg: Petropolis, 2008), 97–113. 22 Pelevin, The Blue Lantern, 99. 23 Dalton-Brown, “Ludic Nonchalance,” 227. 24 Ibid., 97. 25 Ol’ga Bogdanova and Tat’iana Shchuchkina, Literaturnye traditsii v sovremennoi russkoi proze: Viktor Pelevin (St. Petersburg: Fakul’tet filologii i iskusstv SPbGU, 2009), 24.

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bicycle flying through the sky. The story’s uncharacteristically happy ending has led some scholars, like Olga Bogdanova, to label it as an outlier from the rest of Pelevin’s early catalogue.26 The shed in this story resists its mandated purpose; it is tormented by the fact that whatever it houses takes over its consciousness. Its path out of this quandary must be the realization and assertion of agency. The shed’s efforts at looking inward can be seen in a conversation it has with a neighbor about life’s meaning: When he tried to share some of his experiences with the occultminded garage that stood beside him, the answer he received was that in fact there is only one higher happiness: ecstatic union with the archetypal garage. So how could he tell his neighbor about two different kinds of perfect happiness, one of which folded away, while the other had three-speed gears?27

The relationship between the garage and the shed is a fitting microcosm of that between Soviet and post-Soviet realities. The Soviet Union’s emphasis on perfection and progress towards an ideal, embodied by the garage, is juxtaposed with post-Soviet society’s stress on individualism. The shed is promised meaning by becoming like the “archetypal” garage, just as Maresiev in The Story of a Real Man is convinced that personal fulfillment will come only after becoming the model Soviet citizen. Personal goals are cast aside for the collective ideals in both stories, but for Pelevin the movement towards a constructed ideal brings no happiness—the goals are not defined by the individual. For the shed, Maresiev’s trajectory is impossible. Even if it shared the garage’s view of life’s purpose, it could only approximate another’s ideal. Instead, the shed finds freedom by pursuing its own ends, even when that goes against its very existence. The titular story of The Blue Lantern not only presents escape through art as possible, but goes further to assert that the worlds of imagination and reality are the same. The reader is presented with several storytellers—Tolstoy, Crutch, Kolya, and Vasya, who use imagination to escape from the tedium of their lives. The characters’ horrifying and surreal tales challenge the readers’ notion of the border between story and reality. By the end, the storytellers’ world has merged with those of their fiction. The narrator, also a participant in 26 Ibid, 38–39. 27 Pelevin, The Blue Lantern, 141.

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the musings, begins to recognize details of his own apartment and his private life in the stories of his companions.28 The conclusion leaves us with the narrator ruminating on the synchronization of the swaying of a blue lantern standing outside his window and the movement of their shadows, making literal the connection between fact and fiction. Socialist Realist canon merged fact and fiction to offer the reader an example to follow, and provided false but temptingly cohesive explanations for the world. Much like Socialist Realist literature, Pelevin deliberately creates a space that brings together his fictional characters and the real person engaging with his texts, a technique that he continues to develop in his later works. But for Pelevin overarching cohesive explanations are woefully inadequate for making sense of Soviet reality, never mind the amorphous post-Soviet space.29 The reader and characters experience the world in the same way—through the absorption of others’ tales. The blurring of the boundary between real and imagined is experienced by the characters and the reader simultaneously. Pelevin’s artistic technique urges the reader to turn inward to an examination of their own identity to discover answers. Although a tangible reality exists, it is in constant competition with the perception of reality experienced by his characters and readers. Such imaginings, Pelevin asserts, are just as real as the disappointing physical world, and the only mechanisms through which we can experience any sort of liberation from it. Such a liminal construction of the world, wherein Pelevin presents two competing and often overlapping versions of reality and prods the reader to constantly question the validity of what they are reading, is present in many of Pelevin’s other early works as well. Life of Insects, written in 1993, can be seen as an evolution of the author’s interrogation of the concept of reality. The author not only presents the subjective reality of the characters as fluid but also their physical characteristics, as they are described both as humans and as insects. This device takes Pelevin’s deconstruction of a stable notion of reality a step further. The characters are not anthropomorphized bugs, but rather entities that slip between two worlds, transforming back and forth between man and insect seemingly at random. Some scholars have attempted to chart a pattern for these portrayals, likening the switching between bug and man to a stable 28 Pelevin, The Blue Lantern, 159. 29 The story’s contents—a group of people sharing fiction among themselves—and its shared title with the collection, “The Blue Lantern”—make it the most metatextual of the stories in the collection.

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code of spiritual evolution between the two identities.30 Yet the notion of stable classification is challenged by several scenes in the novel, including at the very beginning. Pelevin eases his reader into this idea with the first story, where we see three business partners—Sam, Arthur, and Arnold—leap over the ledge of a balcony and turn into mosquitos.31 Pelevin interrogates his reader, questioning the impression that this bizarre world has on them: “What would this imaginary observer have felt, what would he have done? . . . I don’t know. And probably no one knows what might be expected from someone who does not really exist.”32 He leaves this question open ended throughout the novel. Initially jarring, this ambiguous description of its characters creates an unstable reading of them, with not just their personal identity, but their biological one, being constantly in flux. Pelevin defies the notion of reality not just by validating varying subjective realities, but material reality as well, calling into question the idea that anything can be “real,” and whether what is real for someone subjectively can ever be stable. The final story of Blue Lantern, “The Tambourine of the Upper World” (“Buben verkhnego mira”), relies on the reader’s familiarity with Socialist Realist character types to convey the author’s critical vision of post-Soviet reality. The narrative follows a trio of women, Masha, Tanya, and Tyimy, who have established a business of resurrecting dead foreigners to be married off to Russians for their citizenship. Their most recent quarry is a German pilot whose remains lay forgotten since the Second World War. The three arrive at the wreck of a shot-down fighter plane in the woods and resurrect their latest specimen, but they are disappointed to find the pilot is a Soviet man, and thus worthless for their purposes. Despite this professional disappointment, Masha finds herself attracted to Major Zvyagintsev, who tells her about the afterlife and invites her to join him there before shooting himself to return to the dead. The story leaves the reader with the image of Masha looking out of a train window in tears, clutching a reed pipe the Major had given to her and contemplating what transpired.33 The model of escape presented in “The Tambourine” reflects the attempts of post-Soviet society to uncritically adopt Western social and cultural norms. 30 Tetyana Shevchuk, “Spiritual Evolution as Metamorphose (on the Base of Victor Pelevin’s Novel Life of Insects),” Journal of Danubian Studies and Research 3, no. 3 (2013): 220–231. 31 Pelevin, The Life of Insects, 6–7. 32 Ibid, 7. 33 Pelevin, The Blue Lantern, 179.

CHAPTER 1    The Early Years: Post-Soviet with a Capital “S”

This escape was primarily ideological, represented by government attempts to institute sweeping political reform. But it was also present in a literal sense, with individual citizens emigrating to the West to leave behind material hardship. In “The Tambourine,” Masha and Tanya’s work correlates with the experience of numerous emigres who sought to escape post-Soviet hardships in an idealized “imaginary West.”34 For Pelevin, this imagined space is just as unstable and unfulfilling as the post-Soviet world, a theme he explores later in Life of Insects, in particular with the story of Seryozha who, depicted as a cockroach crawling his way through the earth to America, forgets his lifelong desire to escape to the surface in pursuit of this false ideal.35 Masha and Tanya reflect this same ambivalence towards the West, and while they themselves are busy gathering the means for others to escape abroad, into the welcoming arms of a new ideology, they are tempted to escape into a different reality—the afterlife, inherently ambiguous and just as disappointing. With Masha, Tanya, and Tyimy, we see Pelevin warp the traditional role of women in Socialist Realist literature to establish its incompatibility with the present. Typically, women’s role was limited to acting as nurturing companions to the hero, with love and eroticism present only insofar as they aligned with this model.36 Some Soviet novels did feature women as protagonists, including the Ur-text of Socialist Realism, Maxim Gorky’s novel Mother (Mat’, 1906).37 However, even there the more traditional feminine role predominated: Pelageya Vlasova, the main character of Gorky’s novel, provided material and emotional wellbeing for her communist son Pavel before becoming an enlightened Soviet woman herself. The women in “Tambourine” twist the values of this role. They do “nurture” others insofar as they provide a service for their clients, but their professional congregation with the dead makes them more reminiscent of witches than caregivers. The fact that “enemy” pilots—that is, the Spanish, Italian, and German soldiers—are valued over Soviet ones speaks to their moral indifference.38

34 For a discussion of the concept of the “imaginary West,” see Alexei Yurchak, Everything was Forever Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 158–207. 35 Pelevin, The Life of Insects, 137–150. 36 Clark, The Soviet Novel, 183. 37 Maksim Gorky, Mother: The Great Revolutionary Novel (New York: Citadel, 1992). First published in Russian, Maksim Gor’kii, Mat’ (Berlin: Izdatel’stvo Ladyzhnikova, 1907). 38 Pelevin, The Blue Lantern, 174.

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Major Zvyagintsev’s character also resonates with the Socialist Realist canon. His military background and heroic sacrifice point to positive archetypes like Maresiev, but the Major is a diminished reimagining of these tropes. His death, not in battle but while moving airplanes, and his refusal to refer to himself as a Soviet pilot, undermine his image as a Socialist Realist hero.39 However, this modesty is not a flaw, and Pelevin locates a sense of comfort in the mild disappointment that occurs through this implicit comparison. The thread of disappointment continues through the story, felt both by the reader and Masha as the true nature of the afterlife is revealed: “But what’s it like there?” “Fine,” said the Major, and he smiled again.” “Well, do you have things, like people do?” “How can I explain, Masha. We do, but then we don’t. Everything’s a bit indefinite, a bit vague. But that’s only if you start thinking about it.” “Where do you live?” “I have something like a little house and a plot of land. It’s quiet there, very nice.”40

Despite this modest revelation, Masha is drawn to Zvyagintsev. Having been pushed to witchcraft and necromancy by capitalism, she finds something reassuring in him. This is because Zviagintsev represents personal connection rather than a heroic type. His appeal lies in his freedom to be his own person. This, Masha realizes, is something she cannot have in the post-Soviet space. Her tears at the end of the story are laced with the regret at not being able to follow the Major to his escape. In The Blue Lantern we see several thematic concerns that would carry into Pelevin’s later prose. Foremost among these are the necessity of independence from outside ideological influences, the subjective nature of reality, and the possibility of escape it offers. In addition to these thematic concerns, The Blue Lantern offers us a view into the mechanisms through which Pelevin conveys his particular brand of postmodernist prose. The author heavily relies on ambiguity and the instability of descriptive categories to suggest a discord between the characters’ subjective perceptions of reality and the world they inhabit, asserting the artificiality of supposed “objective” constructions of real39 Ibid., 173. 40 Ibid., 177.

CHAPTER 1    The Early Years: Post-Soviet with a Capital “S”

ity while simultaneously affirming the validity of their subjective perceptions. On the whole, what we see from these stories is Pelevin breaking down the line between collective and subjective formulations of what is “real” and asserting that the latter is just as valid, if not more so, than the former.

Omon Ra: Back to the Future If The Blue Lantern mediates between the aesthetic relics of the Soviet past and the existential concerns of the post-Soviet present, the 1992 novella Omon Ra takes this strategy further. Here Pelevin produces a complete reimagining of the Socialist Realist novel.41 He is not just incorporating generic elements into a multifaceted story, he is writing in a specific subgenre, the Socialist Realist bildungsroman, to expose the falsehood of Soviet ideological and philosophical assertions.42 The bildungsroman emerged in Western literature in the eighteenth century. The conventions of the genre, as identified by the literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin, include a plot oriented around the development of a single character, the prominence of that character over all others, a monocentric, gradual plot, the development of a dynamic personality, and biographic storytelling.43 In Soviet literature, the bildungsroman was a popular genre, embraced by the Communist Party as a way of instilling Soviet values in the country’s population. It was also explored by writers outside the literary establishment such as Mikhail Bulgakov and Boris Pasternak.44 Although it wavered in popularity over the course of the USSR’s existence, the genre was repeatedly thrust back into fashion and remained a literary staple until the fall of the USSR.45 Polevoi’s The Story of a Real Man contains elements of a Bildungsroman in that Maresiev’s conversations with his mentor in the hospital spur the personal growth that allows him to commit to a return to the air force. Gorky’s Mother is another prominent example, as is Nikolai Ostrovsky’s How the Steel was Tempered (Kak 41 Omon Ra was also lauded by critics at its release, receiving two Russian awards for science fiction writing. 42 For a description and adoption of the bildungsroman as a “Soviet” literary genre, see Lina Steiner, “The Bildungsroman in Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union,” in A History of the Bildungsroman: From Ancient Beginnings to Romanticism, ed. Sarah Graham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 107–116. 43 Mikhail Bakhtin, Roman vospitaniia i ego znachenie v istorii realizma. Cited in T. N. Tokareva, “Traditsii romana vospitaniia v sovetskoi literature,” Vestnik VGU 1 (2011): 93–97. 44 Cf. Steiner, “Bildungsroman,” 107–108. 45 Ibid, 115.

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zakalialas’ stal’, 1936).46 Ostrovsky’s novel, a fictionalized autobiography of Pavel Korchagin, is arguably a model Soviet bildungsroman, offering a detailed description of the hero’s transformation from child to an ignorant but wellintended soldier and finally an enlightened devotee of the Soviet project. The story of Omon the eponymous character of Pelevin's novella, is immediately identifiable as a bildungsroman. He and his friend Mityok, both fascinated with space exploration and disillusioned with their lives, decide to pursue a shared goal of becoming cosmonauts by signing up for a military summer camp. To their shock, once recruited into the Soviet space program, they learn that their country, refusing to admit technological inferiority to the West, is using young boys as fodder to run supposedly “unmanned” projects to the moon. Omon accepts this dismal fate and starts training, despite his disillusionment. The final blow to Omon’s belief in Soviet morality comes when Mityok is arbitrarily executed. Despite these circumstances, reaching the moon remains the protagonist’s personal goal and his only hope to escape, even if it means his death. The launch is a success, and after reaching the moon Omon uses his moonwalker, which resembles a bicycle, to reach a trench where he is to place a radio transmitter. He completes his mission and, without hope of returning home, prepares to take his own life. In doing so, he will become a heroic sacrifice to the Soviet cause. Omon’s journey to become a socialist realist hero leads not to enlightenment but suicide, a twisted version of the rite of passage. However, the gun misfires, and reality begins to unravel. Omon soon discovers that he was never on the moon, and finds himself in the Moscow subway, his entire mission being an absurd test of his worthiness to become a Soviet hero. Once he realizes the deceit, Omon escapes into the subway, where the story ends. Omon’s character is central to Pelevin’s imagining of post-Soviet space. While he is beholden to a Soviet value system, he resists being completely defined by it. His tenor and ambition are matched to a Soviet bildungsroman protagonist like Korchagin, whose relentless pursuit of an outside ideal drives the plot forward. He is steadfastly optimistic, focused on his goal and ready to commit any act of self-sacrifice for the purpose of fulfilling his destiny. Unlike his literary predecessors, however, Omon eventually realizes that his personal vision of destiny is more important than the ideals being pressed upon him. 46 Nikolai Ostrovsky, How the Steel was Tempered, trans. R. Prokofieva (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1952). Originally published in Russian, Nikolai Ostrovskii, Kak zakalialas’ stal’ (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1936).

CHAPTER 1    The Early Years: Post-Soviet with a Capital “S”

Rather than fulfill his role in a greater historical scheme, as Maresiev does when he returns to the sky after his debilitating injuries, Omon succeeds in freeing himself from the oppressive environment of Soviet ideology through personal growth. This marks Omon Ra as a distinctly anti-Soviet bildungsroman.47 This striving for individual growth is seen not only in Omon’s narrative trajectory, it is encoded in the novel’s scenery and characters. His distaste for role models is hinted at early in his attitude towards his father, a drunk who is never spoken of with sympathy.48 The novel repeats the theme of modeling (and Omon’s resistance to it) in the portraits of Maresiev on the space academy’s wall. Omon’s name is also significant: it comes from the acronym used for the Russian riot police, tying the unwilling protagonist to the state’s institutional structures. This is contrasted to his self-chosen codename “Ra,” after the Egyptian god. Rajendra Chitnis locates an even deeper linguistic meaning in the protagonist’s name, with the first syllable “Om,” described as “the mother of all sounds,” corresponding to the protagonist’s mythic presentation in the story; and “on,” the Russian singular masculine pronoun, signifying his determination to preserve and expand his subjectivity.49 The conflict between these two ideas characterizes the novel as a whole, with the willful Omon repeatedly struggling to reconcile a meaningless but deeply engrained Soviet ideology and his individual agency. Pelevin’s attempts to confront the typical trajectory of the socialist realist novel grounds him in the literary traditions of the past, while also presaging his later rebellions against conformity and cultural norms of any kind. Like Ostrovsky’s Korchagin and Gorky’s Pelageya, Omon finds himself in the midst of an ideologically driven narrative deeply familiar to the post-Soviet reader. Yet unlike these figures, he displays a marked indifference towards this heroic narrative that simultaneously makes him seem out of place and gives him a power over their dominance. Although such ideological indifference would be tantamount to failure in traditional Socialist realist literature, for Omon it provides him the opportunity to discover the vapidity of the system in which he is acting.50

47 Steiner, “Bildungsroman,” 116. 48 O. O. Smirnova, “Znaki identichnosti geroev Pelevina,” in Teoriia iazyka. Semiotika. Semantika 2 (2015): 142–149. 49 Chitnis, Literature in Post-Communist Russia and Eastern Europe, 153. 50 This play with the rite of passage, transforming it from a moment of ideological confirmation to deconstruction, is also prominent in The Yellow Arrow. There, the hero Andrei expe-

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Omon’s attitude toward his education also distinguishes him from his antecedents in Socialist Realist literature. He ironizes and even detests his experience at the academy, especially its ideological components. He is committed to the goal of reaching space, but this comes from his internal drive rather than an external sense of duty. He can hardly remember the exams he takes in the camp, and his time in lecture with General Kondratiev is negatively distinguished by his attention to an image of “a weight hanging on a chain to make a clock work,” a reflection of his own position vis-à-vis the state’s broader goal and a reduction of his anticipated heroism into mechanistic terms.51 Perhaps the greatest difference we see in Pelevin’s novel vis-a-vis the Soviet bildungsroman is the setting. According to Bakhtin’s conceptualization, the hero’s growth is only one component of the genre; the second is the environment in which this growth occurs. For the character’s successful development to be manifest, it must be accomplished in an environment of “ever-evolving historical reality.”52 This is decisively not the case in Omon Ra. The Soviet space in which Omon and Mitiok find themselves is unambiguously stagnant. This stagnation is reinforced by the structure of the scenes themselves. Much like in Pelevin’s short stories, the areas in which Omon Ra takes place are small confined spaces. But if The Blue Lantern used these microcosmic spaces to speak about the world outside of them, here the feeling of entrapment is palpable.53 This claustrophobia is underscored at the end of the story, when Omon finally travels to what he believes is the moon, the object of his lifelong obsession and the place where he is destined to make his triumphant sacrifice, only to find it devoid of the freedom he had imagined: I thought about how I would raise my head to see the blue sphere of the earth, and this supreme moment of my life would link me with all the moments when I felt I was standing on the threshold of something wonderful beyond comprehension. In fact, the moon proved to be a narrow, black, stuffy space where the faint electric light came on only rarely; it turned out to be constant darkness seen through the useless lenses of the spyholes, and restless, uncomfortable sleep.54 riences his actualization through realizing the artificiality of the society he is confided in and ultimately escaping it, rather than conforming to it. 51 Pelevin, Omon Ra, 73. 52 Steiner, “Bildungsroman,” 107. 53 Smirnova, “Znaki,” 143–144. 54 Pelevin, Omon Ra, 122–123.

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Although he remains personally distant from the values of Soviet progress, Omon here shows the pervasiveness of the that model for development, as he still harbors an expectation to experience a rite of passage like those of Soviet heroes. His journey to space, however, turns into a descent deeper into both a real and ideological prison. The boy realizes his path to awakening is untenable within the Soviet system. His goal is no longer to conform to the reality he is surrounded by—but to escape it. Pelevin’s hero discovers personal agency amidst the dominance of ideology.55 The external world, as Genis describes it, “represents a sequence of artificial constructs, in which man is forever doomed to search for a “pure, archetypal reality.”56 Omon’s ultimate pursuit of an individual truth over ideological adherence shows that, to Pelevin, becoming a model Soviet citizen is a meaningless proposition, or more aptly—it is as meaningless as any other model of reality. Pelevin’s message about the emptiness of ideology, in opposition to the fulfillment it offers in the traditional Soviet bildungsroman, is seen during Omon’s acceptance of his “mission” from Colonel Urchagin: We Communists had no time to prove the correctness of our ideas— the war cost us too much of our strength, we had to spend too long struggling against the remnants of the past and the enemies within the country. We just didn’t have the time to defeat the West technologically. But in the battle of ideas, you can’t stop for a second. The paradox—another piece of dialectics—is that we support the truth with falsehood, because Marxism carries within itself an allconquering truth, and the goal for which you will give your life is, in a formal sense, a deception.57

Such a characterization of the mission—aimed only at creating the façade of advanced society—reveals the hollowness that Pelevin sees characterizing Soviet life. Urchagin becomes a warped version of the Socialist Realist “mentor.” We might even say he is successful in this capacity, since, while he is unable to turn Omon into a true Soviet, his senseless devotion to ideology prompts the protagonist realize the dangers of giving oneself over to another’s ideal. 55 The tension between the boy’s internal monologues and external realia of the world is a key source of conflict in the novel. 56 Genis, “Borders and Metamorphoses,” loc. 5266. 57 Pelevin, Omon Ra, 44.

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While Omon is novel’s narrator, the author Pelevin occasionally reaches out to confront the reader directly. The most prominent example of this technique comes in the novel’s epigraph, “For the Heroes of the Soviet Cosmos.”58 Existing outside the main body of the novel, it is difficult to conceive of these lines as coming from anyone but Pelevin himself. Initially reading as sincere, this epigraph sets a tone that clashes with the story’s content, an irony that is not perceived until after the fate of these heroes becomes evident. Scholars have thus interpreted the dedication itself as ironic, a “parodic imitation of Socialist Realist fiction.”59 Such a contradictory fusion of the deconstruction of a literary genre with a didactic mocking of reality is characteristic of Pelevin’s literary ethos, and the author would continue to develop this technique in later works.60 Especially of note here is Pelevin’s continued reliance on metatextual elements, especially epigraphs, to cultivate an initial sense of absurdity in the reader. These are not always as ambiguous as the lead-in to Omon Ra (for instance, the epigraph to Life of Insects is a Brodsky lyric about the buzzing of insects in a garden), yet they each affect the reader’s perception of the coming text. Omon Ra certainly mocks the Soviet bildungsroman, but it also uses that generic model to impart an earnest idea upon the reader. Omon emerges from the narrative as a meta-utopian hero, one who “becomes conscious of the real effects of utopian, dystopian, and counterutopian schemes as they become fixed as ideology and shape the perceptions and behavior of real people in society.”61 This allows Omon to break out of the restrictive paradigms and think independently. By foregrounding this possibility of escape and seeing it through to its natural conclusion, Omon Ra is one of Pelevin’s most overtly optimistic early works. Whereas in The Blue Lantern and The Life of Insects we predominantly see characters trapped within an imposed ideal intermixed with a few exceptional cases, here the focus is on one character’s ability to challenge that ideal through an embrace of his own subjectivity.

Conclusion Pelevin’s early works reveal just how tightly the standard of post-Soviet literature was tied to the Soviet past. While he and his fellow postmodernist writers 58 Ibid., v. 59 Chitnis, Literature in Post-Communist Russia and Eastern Europe, 144. 60 Khagi, “From Homo Sovieticus to Homo Zapiens: Victor Pelevin’s Consumer Dystopia,” The Russian Review 67 (October 2008): 578–579. 61 Clowes, Russian Experimental Fiction, 141.

CHAPTER 1    The Early Years: Post-Soviet with a Capital “S”

departed from the Soviet literary norms and conventions, they did so by relying on familiar forms and models. In this way, Pelevin’s post-Soviet literature is one of synthesis rather than replacement. The fundamental paradox of the Soviet Union—the tension between the state’s authoritarian demands on the collective and private lives that had been carved out around the margins—had to be processed in order to move beyond, and familiar literature was one of the chief means to achieve this end.62 By taking the domineering literary forms from the Soviet era and bending them to examine individuals’ lived reality, Pelevin’s early works attempt to “come to terms with [the Soviet Union’s] disastrous past and forge a new artistic language for its uncertain future.”63 Although in later works Pelevin would move away from these pure reflections on the past and towards other concerns, such as his admiration of Buddhism and the artificiality of cultural production under capitalism, the dissection and deconstruction of Soviet culture is indisputably a key component of his early writings as a whole. Other works from Pelevin’s early career, such as the aforementioned The Yellow Arrow and Life of Insects as well as the novel Buddha’s Little Finger (Chapaev i pustota, 1996) would expand his examination of the conflict between Soviet ideology and personal freedom.64 Moreover, many of the thematic and tonal foci of these representative works from his early career, such as his critique of enforced ideology and his embrace of an ambiguous sense of humor, would prove to be foundational for his mature literary career. Even after the author more or less moved on from the Soviet space, later efforts like Generation ‘П’ (1999), IPhuck 10 (2017) and Secret Views of Mount Fuji (Tainye vidy na goru Fudzi, 2018) would further assert the author’s repudiation of collective identity, this time targeting the capitalist, hyper-consumerist space of post-Soviet Russia.65 Pelevin’s early prose interrogates what it means to be post-Soviet when the “Soviet” part of one’s identity has not fully disappeared. His narratives’ 62 Yurchak, Everything was Forever, 283. 63 Elana Gomel, “Viktor Pelevin and Literary Postmodernism in Post-Soviet Russia,” Narrative 21, no. 3 (October 2013): 321. 64 Victor Pelevin, Buddha’s Little Finger, trans. Andrew Bromfield (Cambridge, MA: New Directions Books, 1996). Originally published in Russian, Viktor Pelevin, Chapaev i pustota (Moscow: Vagrius, 1996). Also translated as Victor Pelevin, The Clay Machine Gun (London: Faber and Faber, 2002). 65 Idem, Homo Zapiens, trans. Andrew Bromfield (New York: Viking, 2002). Originally published in Russian, Viktor Pelevin, Generation ‘П’ (Moscow, Vagrius, 1999). Also translated as Babylon (London: Faber and Faber, 2001). Idem, Iphuck 10 (Moscow: Eksmo, 2017). Idem, Tainye vidy na goru Fudzi (Moscow: Eksmo, 2018).

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microcosmic spaces reflect the ideological vacuum of the transition and the conflict that arises out of the inability to look inward to adjust. He deconstructs the conventions of the past while using those didactic models to impart his own philosophy to the reader. This philosophy, as identified and these and other early works, places the perception of reality and identity over any sort of outside forces that would seek to contradict or judge it. The stories of The Blue Lantern offer several different models demonstrating the power of individually constructed realities, and Omon Ra takes these assertions a step further as the author reveals the emptiness of external ideologies and power structures. While Pelevin’s focus would later expand beyond the lingering imposition of Soviet culture, it is in this context that he began to experiment with his literary voice, and develop some of the critiques and thematic interests that would become characteristic of his prose as a whole. These early works are thus like the old janitors in the “Nika” story, “pensioners on the final shift of the old Party generation, still holding aloft the last living branch from the withered tree of the people’s unity.”66

66 Pelevin, The Blue Lantern, 100.

CHAPTER 2

Space-Time Poetics in Chapaev and the Void SOFYA KHAGI, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

S

hortly after the Soviet cosmos exploded in what many took for festive fireworks, Victor Pelevin came up with a pyrotechnics of his own, a novel that shatters established notions of space, time, history, and self. Two spatialtemporal planes organize its architectonics—the Civil War circa 1919 and the early post-Soviet 1990s. In the Civil War timeline, the protagonist Pyotr Pustota fights alongside Bolshevik leader-turned-Buddhist guru Vasily Chapaev and machine-gunner Anna in various locales in Russia; in the 1990s he is being treated for schizophrenia in a psychiatric hospital in the Moscow suburbs.1 As scholars have observed, Chapaev and the Void problematizes conventional space-time categories. Rebecca Stakun, among others, notes the novel’s conspicuously cyclical construction: “Pyotr’s story begins and ends in the same cabaret (although it has a new name in the 1990s) and with an encounter with Chapaev.”2 Angela Brintlinger describes the novel’s spaces as “psychic” or “psychiatric”: “Both Pyotr and Pelevin would say that the novel takes place . . . within the head of the individual.”3 Elana Gomel claims that Chapaev and the

1 The characters are taken from Dmitry Furmanov’s novel Chapaev (1923) and the Vasilyev brothers’ movie Chapaev (1934). The historical Vasily Chapaev was a Red Army commander during the Civil War. 2 Rebecca Stakun, Terror and Transcendence in the Void: Viktor Pelevin’s Philosophy of Emptiness (PhD diss., University of Kansas, Lawrence, 2017), 120. 3 Angela Brintlinger, “The Hero in the Madhouse: The Post-Soviet Novel Confronts the Soviet Past,” Slavic Review 63, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 54.

CHAPTER 2    Space-Time Poetics in Chapaev and the Void

Void dramatizes “the collision and confusion not just of different times but of different selves that are careening at random across the socio-historical spacetime of a fallen utopia.”4 Boris Noordenbos makes a related observation from the perspective of trauma studies: “Presenting history as a series of traumatic flashbacks to a past experience, and depicting the present as the deluded projection of a shell-shocked mind from the beginning of the century, Pelevin raises a series of unsettling questions about causality and origin, and about the linearity and ontology of history.”5 In the most sustained, as of the present, analysis of the novel’s spatial-temporal disquisitions, Edith Clowes points out that Chapaev forces the conclusion that it is impossible to say where one’s consciousness resides: “Does my consciousness exist in space, or does space exist in my consciousness?” On one hand, “one’s personal perception of space seems to have created the spatial entities that give one a sense of being and belonging”; on the other, “the world seems physically to exist and to lend one the framework for consciousness.”6 Clowes concludes: “Chapaev supports a Buddhist view of consciousness as existing beyond a single mind and as such existing nowhere.”7 This essay surveys a range of spatial-temporal models that loom large in Chapaev and the Void and argues that, alongside its discursive engagement of space-time theorizing, Pelevin develops a poetics of non-Euclidian and non-Kantian modeling.8 I discuss concepts Pelevin draws on such as Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence, Saṃsāra, Zhuangzi’s butterfly dream, the Kantian categorical imperative and the temporal logic of dreams (Freud) to examine the ways Chapaev and the Void creatively transforms them.9 Pelevin constructs an assortment of non-linear space-times that include circular/recurrent visions of individual and collective existence, dreamscapes, psychic landscapes in Elana Gomel, “Viktor Pelevin and Literary Postmodernism in Post-Soviet Russia,” Narrative 21, no. 3 (2013): 318. 5 Boris Noordenbos, “Shocking Histories and Missing Memories: Trauma in Viktor Pelevin’s Chapaev i Pustota,” Russian Literature 85 (2016): 52. 6 Edith Clowes, Russia on the Edge: Imagined Geographies and Post-Soviet Identity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 77. 7 Ibid., 78. 8 The language of space and time, a principal category of textual modeling, as per MoscowTartu school of semiotics, acquires particular importance in Chapaev and the Void since space-time categories are at the crux of its philosophical questioning. 9 The list is not meant to be exhaustive. The concepts I examine here are either directly referred to by Pelevin (Nietzsche’s Eternal Return, Zhuangzi’s dream, Kant’s categorical imperative) or invoked unambiguously (Saṃsāra, dream logic in psychoanalysis). Some notions such as the Marxist teleology of history are treated in a parodic manner. 4

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flux and landscapes of collective visualizations, train imagery and non-linear mise-en-abymes, metaphors of the transcendental, and warped otherworldly (benign and malignant) realms.10 This “disturbational poetics”—when multiple planes and selves cohabit narrative space in a seemingly fortuitous but in fact carefully structured layout—dislocates Pustota’s and the reader’s linear Weltanschauung and highlights the protagonist’s (Buddhist, solipsistic, but also classical) journey toward liberation and enlightenment.11

When the Eternal Return Meets Sam.s ara The Preface to Chapaev and the Void directly (parodically) references Nietzsche’s doctrine of the Eternal Return: “Literature specialists will probably see in our narrative nothing more than yet one more product of the critical solipsism that has grown fashionable in recent years, but the true value of this document lies in its being the first attempt in the history of culture to embody in the form of art the Mongolian Myth of the Eternal Non-Return.”12 The Eastern myth, that is, the Buddhist notion of breaking the Wheel of Saṃsāra (the cycle of repeated births, mundane existences, deaths, and rebirths) counteracts the Western (Nietzschean) notion of one’s existence re-lived innumerable times.13 10 While I agree with Gomel that the novel enacts the collision of different times and selves, I see these as not careening arbitrarily across narrative space, but as carefully structured. 11 While the Companion’s other two studies of Chapaev and the Void explore Pelevin’s parody of Socialist Realism and his critique of history, I focus on temporal (and spatial) poetics primarily from a philosophical and metaphysical, less of a political, angle. In this analysis, space- and time-related discussions are intertwined. The term “disturbational” comes from Pavel Florenskii, Sochineniia v chetyrekh tomakh, ed. A. Trubachev, M. Trubacheva, and P. Florenskii (Moscow: Mysl᾿, 1994–1999), vol. 3, 121–122. As my theoretical lens, I use Russian (pre)semiotic studies of artistic spatiality and temporality by Bakhtin, Florensky, and Lotman. 12 Pelevin, Chapaev i pustota (Moscow: Vagrius, 1996), 7–8. Translations from Pelevin are my own. I borrow some locutions from Andrew Bromfield’s translation, Buddha’s Little Finger (New York: Penguin, 2000). 13 On Eternal Return, see The Gay Science: “What if some day or night a demon were to slip into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once again and innumerable times again’.” Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, ed. Bernard Williams, trans. Josephine Nauckhoff, poems trans. Adrian del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 194. On Saṃsāra and Nirvana, see, for example, Laumakis: Saṃsāra, “literally, ‘wandering on,’ refers to the cycle of birth, life, death, and subsequent rebirth in ancient Indian philosophy and religion.” Stephen J. Laumakis, An Introduction to Buddhist Philosophy, Cambridge Introductions to Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 20. Nirvana, “literally, to ‘extinguish’ or ‘blow out,’ . . . refers to release from

CHAPTER 2    Space-Time Poetics in Chapaev and the Void

If Nietzsche embraces the eternal recurrence of the same, the Buddhist goal is a release from the illusions and suffering of material existence into a higher spiritual state (Nirvana).14 The protagonist Pustota’s journey will strive toward the latter. Eternal Return acts as a central structural device in Chapaev and the Void. The narrative foregrounds temporal circularity in place of linearity. At the novel’s opening (the Civil War) Pustota arrives in Moscow from St. Petersburg, visits Tverskoi Boulevard and the “Musical Snuffbox” café, meets Chapaev, and departs on his quest. At the novel’s close (the 1990s), he revisits Tverskoi and the café (renamed “John Bull International”), meets Chapaev, and departs into inner Mongolia. Chapters One and Ten have Pustota strolling along Tverskoi in downtown Moscow.15 The opening depicts the area in its 1919 iteration: Tverskoi Boulevard was almost the same as it had been two years ago when I saw it last—again it was February, snowdrifts and a gloom that in a peculiar manner infiltrated even daylight. The same old women were sitting motionless on the benches; above them, beyond the black web of the branches, there was the same grey sky, like a worn mattress drooping down under the weight of a sleeping God. There was, however, a difference. This winter the lanes had been swept by a totally steppe-like blizzard. . . . The bronze Pushkin seemed a little sadder than usual—probably because his breast was covered with a red apron bearing the inscription “Long live the first anniversary of the Revolution.” . . . The Strastnoi Monastery was barely visible through the snowy haze. . . . Two drunken soldiers with rifles with bayonets passed by.16 saṃsāra and the end of suffering.” Ibid., 19. On Nietzsche and Buddhism, see, for example, Antoine Panaiotti, Nietzsche and Buddhist Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). On Eternal Return and Saṃsāra, see ibid., 74–75. 14 “Or have you once experienced a terrific moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine’.” Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 194. “How we personally respond to the words of the demon is extremely significant, since we are being asked if we have the psychological strength and courage to will and embrace the eternal return of our lives in the highest highs as well as the lowest lows, knowing that all things will take place again and again.” Bevis E. McNeil, Nietzsche and Eternal Recurrence (Leeds: Palgrave McMillan, 2021), 25. 15 Circular loci such as the Tverskoi and the Strastnoi Boulevards and the Boulevard Ring encircling the historic center of Moscow are key plot points. 16 Pelevin, Chapaev i pustota, 10.

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This description is a mental picture formed against the backdrop of Pustota’s memories of the area prior to 1917 and beyond the novel’s space. The encounter with the site is framed as part of a series: “Almost the same as it had been two years ago,” “again,” “the same old women,” “the same gray sky.” Along with being retrospective, the vision is playfully prospective, as if foreshadowing Pustota’s future returns to Tverskoi. The black-and-white coloring, the darkness, the sweeping blizzard, and the drunken soldiers with rifles invoke Blok’s ecstatic-apocalyptic response to the revolution, The Twelve (Dvenadtsat᾿, 1918).17 The stress on unrelenting recurrence is also reminiscent of Blok’s “Night, Street, Lantern, Drugstore” (“Noch᾿, ulitsa, fonar᾿, apteka,” 1912), a versified version of Nietzsche’s Eternal Return.18 The space of Tverskoi is constructed in part by the historical forces at work, and, more importantly, by Pustota’s subjective cognitive processes. The mental blueprint of the present is generated from its mundane similarity to the past (as per Eternal Return) as well difference from it (and therefore contains a trace of what it is not). The present defines itself vis-à-vis the past and the future just as in space things are opposed to other things positioned outside them. Like the retrospective temporal reference of 1917, the imperial capital of Petersburg lies outside the novel’s narrative bounds yet looms large in Pustota’s mind.19 Plentiful metaphors in the passage define objects as resembling and/or diverging from others: the Pushkin monument is like (and unlike) its previous incarnation; Moscow is like a steppe; light is like darkness; the sky resembles a mattress drooping under God’s weight, and so forth. That each element of existence constitutes a term of a relationship-substance points to the illusoriness of material reality (per Buddhist doctrine of dependent origination) or epistemological and ontological skepticism à la absences and the free play of tropes familiar from deconstruction (and foreshadowed by Nietzsche).20 17 Pelevin explicitly refers to Blok’s poem (Chapaev i pustota, 36). Aleksandr Blok, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem. V dvadtsati tomakh (Moscow: Nauka, 1997–), vol. 4, 117. 18 Ibid., vol. 3, 23. 19 It is as if the aura of Petersburg, so familiar from classical literature, is projected against the more stolid Moscow landscape: February, twilight, a gloom infiltrating light. 20 On Nietzsche’s play of tropes anticipating deconstruction, see “On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense,” in Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language, With the Full Text of His Lectures on Rhetoric Published for the First Time, ed., trans., and intro. Sander Gilman, Carole Blair, and David Parent (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). Saussure’s taking the value of elements in a linguistic system as generated by their difference from other elements is given a further skeptical twist in Derrida’s concepts of différance and trace. See Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. and ed. Roy Harris (Chicago, IL: LaSalle,

CHAPTER 2    Space-Time Poetics in Chapaev and the Void

Pustota’s sojourn on Tverskoi, however, departs from the Nietzschean paradigm in at least one key respect. With its “there was, however, a difference,” Pelevin’s description does not fulfill the condition of Eternal Return as an exact replica of what occurred before.21 Pelevin recasts the paradigm (on the collective as well as the individual level) to envision a downward spiral in place of cyclicity.22 The setting, all in black and white, is a symbolic chessboard across which history moves, and from which it removes pieces.23 The space condenses Russian history to its key players—Orthodox Christianity, art, and radical politics.24 These forces interact, strive for dominion, and together produce the national narrative. Relative to the pre-revolutionary condition of Tverskoi, the pieces in the Civil War timeline are mostly intact. However, Pushkin has already been summoned to the Bolshevik cause (the red apron), a wilderness is encroaching upon Moscow, and the quasi-disappearance of the Strastnoi Monastery behind the blizzard foreshadows its future obliteration. The final chapter has Pustota revisit the site to reinforce the downward-spiral vision. The description follows the opening passage nearly verbatim. The frame of reference is once more retrospective, this time 1919 versus the 1990s. Cyclicality imprints monotony on events, making life a senseless running in place, but the contrasts between the initial and the concluding depictions of Tverskoi

21 22

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1986). Derrida defines trace in temporal terms, as the lack that is the condition of all thought and experience: trace marks the absence of a presence, an always already absent present. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1976). Per deconstruction, metaphors constitute objects by the relation to what they are not. On poststructuralist critique of tropes, see, for example, Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). On dependent origination—all things or dharmas having meaning and existence only in relation to other dharmas—see Stakun, Terror and Transcendence in the Void, 120–121, and Laumakis, An Introduction to Buddhist Philosophy, 81 and 267. On Buddhism in Chapaev and the Void, see also Ol᾿ga Bogdanova, Sergei Kibal᾿nik, and Liudmila Safronova, Literaturnye strategii Viktora Pelevina (St. Petersburg: Petropolis, 2008). “There will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence.” Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 194. Eternal Return as originally described by Nietzsche concerns individual, not collective, recurrence. The doctrine has been extended to communal history by later thinkers. Martin Heidegger, for example, reads Nietzsche as implying that it is not simply one’s personal past that will return, but rather the collective history of the world. See Aaron Lauretani, Becoming Godless: Heidegger’s Nietzsche and the Eternal Return (Master’s thesis, York University, Toronto, Ontario, 2018), 10. The black and white make the scene recall an old photograph. Tverskoi Boulevard ends at Tverskaya Street, which nearly reaches the Kremlin, the seat of political power, about one kilometer southeast.

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capture further degradation.25 What transpires between 1919 and the 1990s snapshots is implied: the monastery’s demolition (1937) and the relocation of the poet’s statue (formerly facing the monastery) from the left to the right side of Tverskaia/Gorky Street (1950) to the site of the destroyed Strastnoi bell tower. The seat of Orthodoxy is destroyed, and high art has been appropriated by the political status quo (Pushkin in a red apron) before it becomes religion by proxy (Pushkin on the former site of the Strastnoi Monastery) and is ousted altogether (in the absence of the monument from its old spot and relationship to the monastery).26 The transformation is non- or rather anti-teleological: another moment of time devours this moment. Spatial-temporal flux (emphasis on the transience of material phenomena characteristic of Buddhism) is communal and individual, political and ontological. Destruction and fragmentation affect these Moscow landmarks, history at large, and individual human selves. How does this play out in Pustota’s individual Eternal Return or, in Buddhist terms, his reincarnations, in 1919 versus the 1990s?

Dream Time, Zhuangzi and Freud Along with Eternal Return and Sam.sāra, Zhuangzi’s iconic butterfly parable is a central structuring device in Pelevin’s novel. As is the case with Nietzsche, Pelevin directly references Zhuangzi, imbuing the butterfly dream with parodic 25 Both Bakhtin and Lotman read cyclicity as non-movement. For Bakhtin, historical inversion and cyclicity divorce the growth and renewal of life from the progressive forces of history. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981), 84. In Lotman’s discussion of Gogol, linearity contrasts with circularity (mere pretense of movement). Iurii Lotman, “Problema khudozhestvennogo prostranstva v proze Gogolia,” Uchenye zapiski Tartusskogo gos. universiteta, Trudy po russkoi i slavianskoi filologii: Literaturovedenie 11, no. 209 (1968): 43. Lotman’s detailed spatial typology identifies mundane vs. fantastic space, enclosed vs. open space, fragmented vs. continuous space, boundaries, bird’s-eye-view, and reflected (upturned) landscape. There are types of movement that correspond to spaces such as put' (journey or linear, directional trajectory) vs. step' (steppe, movement in any direction), and linearity (directed or non-directed) vs. circularity. 26 Pustota does not see the Pushkin monument because it had been moved to the other side of Tverskaia. Pelevin “uses the historical circumstance of Pushkin’s peregrination to create a metaphor of post-revolutionary and post-Soviet Russia: In Pustota’s imagination, Pushkin was Bolshevized and forced to wear a revolutionary banner in 1919.” “In ‘real’ 1990s Moscow, the statue of Pushkin has been replaced by emptiness.” Angela Brintlinger, “The Hero in the Madhouse,” 56. “Moscow of the 1990s breathes an emptiness suggesting loss, in which these two signals of educated Russian national identity (great literary art and Orthodox Christianity) are noticeably absent.” Clowes, Russia on the Edge, 73.

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political coloring: Chapaev “once used to know a Chinese communist by the name of Tzu-Chuang, who often dreamed the same dream, that he was a red butterfly fluttering through the grass and the flowers. And when he would wake up, he could not grasp whether the butterfly dreamt of being engaged in revolutionary activity or the underground activist dreamt of flitting among flowers.”27 Shot for sabotage, Zhuangzi presumably carries on his fluttering in the grass in the butterfly form.

Zhuangzi’s butterfly dream. Public domain.

Chapaev and the Void imitates the circular structure of Zhuangzi’s parable, switching back and forth between the Civil War and the 1990s. The enigma— is he Zhuangzi who has dreamed of being a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming that he is Zhuangzi—is replicated in Pustota’s 1919/1990s psychic split: Is he a man of the early twentieth century dreaming of post-Soviet Russia or vice versa? Like the Daoist parable, Chapaev and the Void underscores the difficulty of distinguishing between reality and illusion, appearance and essence, waking life and dreams. Although a common-sense way to read the Civil War quest is as a figment of Pustota’s imagination—the post-Soviet quagmire has driven him to mental instability, and he escapes it in a compensatory fantasy about the 27 Pelevin, Chapaev i pustota, 248–249.

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revolution—there is never an explicit indication that 1919 is any less real than the 1990s. To reverse the direction, one may imagine the Civil War as authentic and the 1990s as a futuristic nightmare of a person living at the start of the century and somehow divining its depressing finale.28 On the communal level, the switching between the Civil War and the post-Soviet period disrupts the linear temporal model and, against the grain of Marxist teleology, portrays history as devolution.29 Two critical points of twentieth-century Russian history, positioned symmetrically at the turn and close of the century, rhyme with each other as points of social crisis and upheaval, but the 1990s spin farther along the spiral of degradation. On the individual level, Pustota’s transfers between alternative timelines blur the distinction between waking life and dreams. These transfers—by no means arbitrary— move him back and forth between 1919 and the 1990s pendulum-like: All the odd chapters take place during the Civil War, all even chapters are positioned in the early post-Soviet period. Switches from one timeline to the other always take place at the chapter boundaries. For example, the initial transfer takes place on the boundary between chapters One and Two when Pustota falls asleep in 1919 only to wake up in a psychiatric ward in the 1990s. His slide into oblivion in the Civil War temporality frames what follows as a dream. At the same time, since Pustota wakes up in the next chapter, the preceding section gets reframed retrospectively as a dream. Analogous effects occur on the boundary of chapters Two and Three, Three and Four, and so forth, up to the novel’s finale. The composition of Pustota’s dreams disrupts linear space-time in a manner that, besides Zhuangzi, evokes Freud’s observations on the temporal paradoxes of dreams. Each new Pelevin installment echoes the conclusion of

28 The Civil War timeline can be thought of as mythic/transcendental (at least in the terms of the Soviet foundation myth), and the 1990s as mundane, in the tradition of Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita (Master i Margarita, 1940; 1967) (the Yershalaim vs. the Moscow plane). 29 Elsewhere Pelevin offers a parodic spin on a teleological understanding of history characteristic of Marxism and parodic cause-effect reversal. According to psychiatrist Timur Timurovich Kanashnikov, “There exists a level of dishonorable cunning . . . at which man anticipates the outcome of change even before it is completed,” and “the most sensitive of scoundrels actually adapt to change before it begins.” That is so because “they do not anticipate the future at all but shape it, creeping across to where they think the wind will flow.” Pelevin, Chapaev i pustota, 50.

CHAPTER 2    Space-Time Poetics in Chapaev and the Void

the preceding one.30 The two temporal planes are linked with an image, sound, word etc. For example, the railing Pustota perceives in front of his automobile before drifting off at the end of the first chapter in the 1919 timeline is also the first thing he sees waking up in his 1990s hospital room at the start of chapter Two. These, in Freud’s terms, are stimuli that connect waking and sleeping realms and that originate in waking life and become the source of dreams.31 A similar example is Pustota’s blow to the head with an Aristotle bust during a fight in the mental ward (end of chapter Four) that echoes as his trauma to the head that sends him into an extended coma in 1919 (beginning of chapter Five).32 In a transparent reference to Freud, Pustota observes that his dream about his fellow inmate Serdyuk “was created by his consciousness, following the complex rules that govern the world of dreams, in the instant before he awoke, from the name of a horse that some soldier was shouting under his window.” He also notes that his dream “seemed long and detailed [but] in reality took no more than a second.”33 Besides a perceptual temporal stretch, 30 Again, this reminds one of Bulgakov’s novel, but in Pelevin’s text the same character time travels between two temporal planes. Besides, unlike Bulgakov, Pelevin questions the ontological status of his dual timelines. 31 “There are a great many stimuli of this nature, ranging from those unavoidable stimuli which are proper to the state of sleep or occasionally admitted by it, to those fortuitous stimuli which are calculated to wake the sleeper. Thus a strong light may fall upon the eyes, a noise may be heard, or an odor may irritate the mucous membranes of the nose.” Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. A. A. Brill (n.p.: Digireads.com, 2017), 23. In this connection, Freud refers to Maury’s dream: “The following dream of Maury’s has become celebrated: He was ill in bed; his mother was sitting beside him. He dreamed of the Reign of Terror during the Revolution. He witnessed some terrible scenes of murder, and finally he himself was summoned before the Tribunal. There he saw Robespierre, Marat, FouquierTinville, and all the sorry heroes of these terrible days; he had to give an account of himself, and after all manner of incidents which did not fix themselves in his memory, he was sentenced to death. . . . The knife of the guillotine fell. He felt his head severed from his trunk, and awakened in great anxiety, only to find that the head-board of the bed had fallen, and had actually struck the cervical vertebrae just where the knife of the guillotine would have fallen.” Ibid., 24. 32 The first thing Pustota recalls when regaining consciousness in Altai-Vidnyansk is Aristotle’s bust. 33 Pelevin, Chapaev i pustota, 286–287. Compare to Freud: “Observers have called attention to a whole series of dreams in which the stimulus ascertained on waking and some part of the dream-content corresponded to such a degree that the stimulus could be recognized as the source of the dream.” Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 23. See also: Maury’s dream of the execution “gave rise to an interesting discussion. . . . The question was whether, and how, it was possible for the dreamer to crowd together an amount of dream content apparently so large in the short space of time elapsing between the perception of the waking

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Pustota assumes a temporal reversal in terms similar to The Interpretation of Dreams: waking calls that summon one from nocturnal into diurnal existence appear to retrospectively cause the dream sequence.34 While invoking spatial-temporal twists in dreams à la Freud, Chapaev and the Void destabilizes the clear Freudian division between waking consciousness and sleep. So, when party men Zherbunov and Barbolin reappear as guards in the mental ward in the second chapter, with the 1919 reality reframed retrospectively as a dream and, oppositely, the 1990s dream reframed as reality, the Zherbunov-Barbolin duo links the two timelines in a way that makes it impossible to decide whether they originate as stimuli in the 1990s reality and are incorporated as dream content into the Civil War narrative or vice versa. The four Dynamo-calls that bookend chapters Five to Seven—not a single stimulus incorporated into a single dream but a successive series of stimuli/dream content—further problematize reality versus sleep and linear cause-effect. Do these calls originate in the 1990s reality spinning the 1919 dream, or does the opposite hold true? To complicate the scheme further, Pustota’s falling asleep at the end of chapter Six entails a switch not only into a different timeline (from the Civil War to the 1990s) but to a different person (his fellow inmate Serdyuk). More precisely, Pustota’s dream sequence is multilayered, containing Serdyuk’s dream set inside Pustota’s framing dream of Serdyuk. Thus, at the end of chapter Five (1919) Pustota falls asleep and dreams of Serdyuk tortured by a dynamo machine in the mental ward and crying out “Stop the Dynamo” (1990s). This plea spurs Serdyuk’s own dream of peregrinating in Moscow and encountering the Japanese businessman Kawabata that begins with “Next Station—Dynamo” at the start of the sixth chapter and concludes with “Why shouldn’t some of them support Dynamo?” at the end of the chapter (when Serdyuk regains consciousness in the asylum). Finally, Pustota is woken up in 1919 by a shout by a Red Army soldier underneath his window, “Dynama, where the hell you going?” and interprets the entire dream sequence as originating from that shout.35 stimulus and the awakening.” Ibid., 25–26. Freud is doubtful that dreams can overstep the limitations of time and space, and explains these as perceptual illusions. 34 Freud notes: “‘In former years,’ this author relates, ‘I occasionally made use of an alarm-clock in order to wake punctually at a certain hour in the morning. It probably happened hundreds of times that the sound of this instrument fitted into an apparently very long and connected dream, as though the entire dream had been especially designed for it, as though it found in this sound its appropriate and logically indispensable climax, its inevitable denouement.” Ibid., 24. 35 Pelevin, Chapaev i pustota, 138–139, 184–185, 238–239.

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As Chapaev and the Void insists throughout, the common-sense distinction Freud holds onto between waking life and sleep does not obtain: there is no such thing as “real,” and all of “reality” is part of one’s consciousness.36 What is intriguing about the Dynamo dream sequence, though, is that Pustota interprets “Dynama” as a Freudian waking call, and accordingly, 1919 as reality and 1990s as dream. Serdyuk’s inset hallucination, moreover, is prompted by his torture in the mental ward. The dream about Kawabata tricking him into performing seppuku—like Pustota’s framing narrative of the 1990s—and like Maury’s famous dream of the guillotine Freud discusses in his study—are all nightmares. Although one would have assumed that, like Maury’s imagined execution during the Reign of Terror, the Civil War would provide a proper nightmarish setting, that does not take place. Pustota’s and the other inmates’ nightmares are all set in the 1990s. To return to the butterfly dream, though Chapaev and the Void unsettles the linearity of space and time in Zhuangzi’s vein, Pelevin introduces his own stabilizing correctives to the butterfly parable. Rather than the transspecies metamorphosis of the dream, it is always the same human person, Pyotr Pustota, who traverses the dual timelines of the novel. When dreaming about Serdyuk, for instance, Pustota does not switch identity to that of his fellow inmate but remains himself while seeing in his sleep “a blue-eyed, blondhaired man tethered with loops to a strange-looking seat.”37 Reincarnated in the 1990s in a degraded historical setting (and perhaps a lower karmic form, as a detainee in a mental institution), Pustota preserves a stable set of character traits, memories, likes, and so forth. He does not question his identity and consistently claims to be a person belonging to the revolutionary (or pre-revolutionary, Silver Age, period). His behavior and set of cultural references support this claim.38 Whereas Zhuangzi’s dilemma is who he is, Pustota’s is merely where he is. This dilemma, moreover, is non-ambiguously resolved by the protagonist: in his mind, the Civil War timeline is real, and the 1990s are a nightmare. While the dual timelines cannot be objectively true or false respective to

36 For example, the Anna-Pustota affair is consummated in a dream, but that does not matter. 37 Pelevin, Chapaev i pustota, 186. 38 See, for example, Timur Timurovich’s test in the novel’s last chapter when Pustota’s psychiatrist decides to release Pustota: “What was the target at which the cruiser Aurora fired?” Pustota recalls “that terrible black night in October 1917 when the Aurora sailed into the estuary of the Neva.” Pelevin, Chapaev i pustota, 380.

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each other (per the novel’s solipsism and Buddhism), one of them—the Civil War timeline—is authentic for Pelevin’s hero.39 The structure of dreams foregrounds Pustota’s psychic choice as well as influences the reader’s perception. The 1919 setting in the novel’s opening chapter establishes the initial impression of it being real (an impression disturbed but not entirely dispensed with later).40 When Pustota falls asleep at the chapter’s end, it is as if he is being drugged and forcibly pulled into the 1990s world: “The fresh air affected me like ether fumes, my head began to spin. . . . I collapsed into the dark pit of oblivion.”41 The snow-covered railing of the boulevard he perceives in front of his automobile in 1919 before drifting off transforms into prison-like “bars across a small window” in his 1990s hospital room.42 There is clearly greater unfreedom in post-Soviet Russia. Pustota’s falling asleep in the Civil War timeline in the subsequent chapters invariably frames the 1990s as a series of painful nightmares (not vice versa): “I felt that I should not on any account fall asleep but could do nothing about it”; “I collapsed on it [the bed] and began tumbling down into the next nightmare.”43 If nothing exists objectively, what matters is the quality of one’s psychic reality—whether it enables liberation or entrapment, rich thought and emotion or stultifying existence and readymade simulacra.

The Plane of the Non-Self and the Train of the Self The inset novellas by Pustota’s fellow inmates, Simply Maria, Serdyuk, and Volodin, in the 1990s timeline, complicate the novel’s structure and provide additional psychic-hallucinatory settings. While all three of Pustota’s inmates cling to a strong hand in the aftermath of the country’s collapse, showcasing the disintegration of the post-Soviet psyche in their parodic-absurdist imaginings of the New Master, it is Maria who most clearly embodies the surrender of personhood, not merely on the level of the political but in a more drastic sense

39 Pustota “himself chooses the world in which he is Chapaev’s commissar, and follows this choice with the greatest consistency possible.” Mark Lipovetskii, Paralogii: Transformatsii (post)modernistskogo diskursa v kul᾿ture 1920–2000 godov (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2008), 427. 40 The Preface also identifies the setting as the early 1920s. 41 Pelevin, Chapaev i pustota, 39. 42 Ibid, 41. 43 Ibid., 108, 183.

CHAPTER 2    Space-Time Poetics in Chapaev and the Void

of being a non-entity/simulacrum that runs counter to Pustota’s, however paradoxical, search for freedom and meaning.44 The visualization Maria channels is a scathing diagnosis of post-Soviet manhood adrift in Baudrillardian phantoms. A young bodybuilder shellshocked during the 1993 attack on the Russian parliament (apparently while engaging in sexual intercourse) develops a phantasy of being Simply Maria, heroine of a popular Latin American soap opera. In her vision, Maria finds herself on the Krasnopresnenskaya Embankment during the 1993 parliament shelling and meets Arnold Schwarzenegger, in his roles as the Terminator (from the 1993 film) and the protagonist of True Lies (1994). Maria imagines herself a sweet and simple girl eager to alleviate human suffering, à la the sugary protagonist of the soap opera, yet she feels too weak to accomplish anything on her own, and is elated to enter “alchemical wedlock” with Schwarzenegger.45 Her flight with Schwarzenegger on his Harrier jet above Moscow transposes their power relations to spatial terms. It is the Hollywood strongman who is in the position of military might and sexual prowess vis-à-vis Moscow and Maria.46 Moscow’s transformation from the vantage of the Harrier jet encapsulates, as does Simply Maria’s vignette at large, Russia succumbing to Western pop sensibilities: iconic golden domes of Moscow’s churches come to resemble “meaningless rivets on a gigantic biker’s jacket.”47 By the end of the dream sequence, Schwarzenegger reveals himself to be a killer robot, and Maria is taken sexually (as conveyed unambiguously by her straddling the penis-like fuselage of Schwarzenegger’s Harrier jet) and dispensed with in a business-like manner, crashing onto the spire of the Ostankino television tower. The novel’s leitmotif, solipsistic production of space, is twisted here to convey a collective, not individual, visualization, and, moreover, one that 44 Clowes interprets the novel as “an effort to diagnose national-imperial psychosis as Soviet identity disintegrates into fragments and the Symbolic Order gives way to an absurd collage of symbols from a wide variety of cultures, not only Russian.” What interests Pelevin “is the collective psyche of the imperial nation, embodied in the four inmates of the 1990s psychiatric hospital.” Clowes, Russia on the Edge, 81. 45 The notion of “alchemic wedlock” with Schwarzenegger highlights Maria’s inferiority complex. (S)he needs her Western bridegroom to remedy her inner lack and help her achieve the gold standard. 46 The relationship is a classic of Neo-colonialism as in Said’s analysis. The colonizer is an alpha male while the colonized is emasculated. See Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 6, 207–208, 291. The shelling of the Parliament is televised (and likely staged) by CNN. 47 Cf. Pustota’s “Only after I had thought of the place where we were located it did materialize.” Pelevin, Chapaev i pustota, 73.

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is cheaply simulacrum-like.48 As in Pustota’s mental picture of Tverskoi, Maria, enveloped by the fog from the shelling, produces the space by peering around—as if objects and people possess no independent existence outside her sphere of perception.49 The visualization bleeds through like a photographic (filmic) image. More important than Pustota’s (and the other patients’) ability to perceive everything that Maria is thinking and feeling during hypnotic therapy sessions is that Maria (and Schwarzenegger) “are woven by the thousands of individual Russian consciousnesses thinking that second about them.”50 The characters channel the thoughts and feelings of the collective post-Soviet psyche while themselves being, in an ironic circularity, media phantoms that infiltrate the minds of average post-Soviet TV consumers—icons, moreover, imported from Latin America and Hollywood.51 The Maria-Schwarzenegger flight is a comic apotheosis of power brazenly wielded and single-mindedly received. Maria fully identifies with the flying man’s authority—as someone (something) who possesses no selfhood. Nor can she have one, being a media phantom.52 48 Ibid., 110. The motif of solipsism permeates Pelevin’s oeuvre. For instance, Roman Shtorkin, the protagonist of Empire V, imagines “All of the world made up of one substance. And this substance was myself.” Viktor Pelevin, Ampir V: Povest' o nastoiashchem sverkhcheloveke. (Moscow: Eksmo, 2006), 348. 49 The fog is literal (from the shelling) and figurative, conveying the character’s disorientation under post-Soviet realities. Maria is unsure of what’s going on and wonders if perhaps a movie is being shot across the river or if New Russians are fighting. Ironically, both hypotheses bear up. Simply Maria’s vignette directs its satirical thrust against the pervasive power of the media (à la Baudrillard) while also emphasizing the criminal nature of post-Soviet political power play. 50 Pelevin, Chapaev i pustota, 64. 51 As a critique of media-controlled existence, Simply Maria’s vignette anticipates Pelevin’s later sustained explorations of postmodern virtuality in novels including Generation ‘П’ (1999), Empire V (2006), and S.N.U.F.F. (2011). In many of Pelevin’s novels after the mid-1990s, the problematic of solipsism combines with the Baudrillardian hyper-reality. For instance: “Any reality is a sum of informational technologies. As much equally applies to the star the brain divines in the impulses of the eye nerve and the Orkish revolution the news inform us about.” Viktor Pelevin, S.N.U.F.F. (Moscow: Eksmo, 2011), 27. 52 As Lotman observes: “One may possess no selfhood and adapt to the structure of surrounding space to the point of becoming an automaton. By contrast, a character may oppose external space through a capacity to resist based on selfhood—a doer, creator, artist, warrior—having one’s own path and one’s own moral space.” Lotman, “Problema khudozhesvennogo prostranstva v proze Gogolia,” 43. Maria is able to adapt to the structure of the surrounding space more effectively than the other inmates of the mental ward and is accordingly released first. By contrast, Pustota “persists in his attempts to clarify his nonexistent relationship with the shadows of a vanished world.” Pelevin, Chapaev i pustota, 46–47.

CHAPTER 2    Space-Time Poetics in Chapaev and the Void

If Maria and the other characters in the 1990s timeline are emasculated, disoriented, trapped in the psychiatric ward—or, more drastically, converted into simulacra—in the Civil War timeline Pustota departs on a quest where he traverses physical and philosophical expanses, fights, falls in love, and learns about the world and himself.53 He launches on his quest after meeting his commander and guru-to-be Chapaev, and his path intersects with characters like Anna, Kotovsky, and Jungern who all contribute to his development.54 Unlike the prisoners in the 1990s timeline, these characters are continuously in motion, traversing the expanses of Russia from Moscow to beyond the Urals. Trains, railroads, and train stations figure in Chapaev and the Void as key locales in plot development.55 The railways range from the Moscow subway system and local lines and trains to railroads and railway stations in the European and Asiatic parts of the country. The Yaroslavsky Station, the Western terminus of the Trans-Siberian line, anticipates Pustota’s literal and philosophical gravitation toward the East and his subsequent Buddhist-like enlightenment. Pelevin recasts the iconic trope of the train to switch gears from collective histories to individual selves. In the third chapter, Pustota departs from Moscow Yaroslavsky Station on Chapaev’s military train. The description of the train taps into the “Locomotive of History” or “Locomotive of the Revolution” tropes proper to his Civil War fantasizing but, characteristically for Pelevin, it rethinks these as metaphors of individual subjectivity.56 Pustota imagines feelings-carriages that are terrifying, accidental, and not even one’s own, pulled 53 The Serdyuk-Kawabata story (the second inset novella) is symmetric to MariaSchwarzenegger. Schwarzenegger and Kawabata are out for exploitation and ultimately destruction. The seeming superiority of the spiritual East over the materialist West merely masks the same exploitative neo-liberal tendencies. Kawabata utilizes second-hand Japanese aesthetic to ingratiate himself with Serdyuk, just as Schwarzenegger hides his inhuman nature under the demeanor of democracy and philanthropy. 54 Kotovsky is based off the historical Grigory Kotovsky, a Soviet military leader. The name Jungern plays on Baron Ungern von Sternberg, dictator of Mongolia for six months in 1921, and Carl Jung, founder of analytical psychology. 55 As per Bakhtin and Lotman, road meetings and adventures organize narrative space; for an epic quest to proceed, those involved in it need some means of transport, whether it be Gogol’s troika or, in later narratives, the train. Lotman, “Problema khudozhestvennogo prostranstva v proze Gogolia,” 33. 56 Whether conceptualized positively (as modernity, progress, revolution) or negatively (as disruptive and out of control), the railroad and the train offer spatial-temporal metaphors of historical movement that are familiar from nineteenth-century classics and narratives of the revolution and the Civil War. David Bethea explores the apocalyptic imagery of the train in works that portray the events of 1917 such as Andrey Platonov’s Chevengur (1928) and Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago (Doktor Zhivago, 1957). See David Bethea, The Shape of

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all along the route of life. How to get rid of this burden? Chapaev responds by having his assistant, the Bashkir, disconnect the string of carriages behind from the staff carriage: “Man is rather like this train. In the same way he is doomed for all eternity to drag after him out of the past a string of dark and terrible carriages inherited from goodness knows whom. And he calls the meaningless rumbling of the accidental coupling of hopes, opinions and fears his life. And there is no way to avoid this fate.” “Why not?” asked Chapaev. The Bashkir seemed to have been waiting for precisely this signal. . . . There was a dull clanging sound, and . . . the dark carriage wall facing us began slowly receding. . . . If only it were really possible, as simply as Chapaev had parted from these men, to leave behind me that dark gang of false “I”s that had been bankrupting my soul for so many years!57

The separation of the staff carriage from the rest of the train is symbolic of Pustota, Chapaev, and Anna cutting themselves off from communal history and Bolshevik ideology. But there is more at stake. This freeing of the self, rushing forward in darkness and solitude, is a captivating image. Yet Pustota is unsure that the illusory “I”s plaguing his spirit can be as easily dispensed with. What is the “genuine self,” and how to free that self from those that are “false”? Besides the Yaroslavsky terminal, the Lozovaya Station is a juncture at which a key plot development takes place. It is this locale, not Moscow or elsewhere, that provides the novel’s central narrative knot. This is where Pustota fights alongside Chapaev and Anna in the Civil War, and this is also where he is

Apocalypse in Modern Russian Fiction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 172–175, 255. 57 Pelevin, Chapaev i pustota, 106–107. Pelevin’s early novella, The Yellow Arrow (Zheltaia strela, 1993) employs the train as a metaphor of late Soviet history (but also individual subjectivity). In Pelevin’s later novel, Love for Three Zuckerbrins (Liubov᾿k trem tsukerbrinam, 2014), the narrator Kiklop uses train imagery to convey the notion of alternative universes. Each car in what he terms a “train of fate” is connected “not only to the one preceding it and the one that follows, but to the multiplicity of cars in trains that ride along alternative universes.” The trains themselves “do not interfere with each other, but sometimes passengers can switch from train to train.” Pelevin, Liubov᾿k trem tsukerbrinam (Moscow: Eksmo, 2014), 127.

CHAPTER 2    Space-Time Poetics in Chapaev and the Void

detained in the psychiatric asylum in the 1990s.58 The reference to Lozovaya occurs in chapter Four when Pustota (in the psychiatric ward) comes across a long sheet of cardboard with weird drawings on it: The drawing . . . broke all the rules of perspective and meaning. The right section of the cardboard was occupied by a representation of a large city. When I spotted the bright yellow dome of St. Isaac’s, I realized it was St. Petersburg. . . . From St. Petersburg a dotted line led to Moscow. . . . Leading away from the [Yaroslavsky] Station was a fine double cobweb line of a railroad, which widened as it approached the center of the sheet. . . . The tracks ran off to . . . a train . . . that had halted only a few meters short of a station, the greater part of which was beyond the edge of the sheet; all that could be seen was the platform barrier and a sign “Lozovaya Station.” . . . The segment between the plan of the battle and the train, where in principle the sky should have been—a large area of the cardboard—was blank. As a result, there was an impression of a gaping void.59

The sketch—his own, Pustota quickly realizes—is a mise-en-abyme of the framing text that disrupts linear perspective and reflects the subjective importance Pustota attaches to various episodes of his journey. With its abundant detail and confusing composition, the panorama seems like an illustration to Tolstoy’s epic War and Peace (Voina i mir, 1868–1869) that would include all the characters and action, but actually, it is a depiction of Chapaev and the Void that maps out the trajectory of its protagonist’s quest. It starts at Petersburg in the right-hand section, moves to Moscow, and then to Chapaev’s military train and the battle of Lozovaya in which Pustota, Chapaev, and Anna all fight. The streets of St. Petersburg are merely sketched out, as this period of his life is left tantalizingly outside the narrative bounds. In Moscow two places are represented in detail—Tverskoi Boulevard and Yaroslavsky Station—where key events of his journey take place. The central episode, the battle of Lozovaya, is foregrounded as the largest in the drawing, since Pustota attaches the utmost importance to what happens there. 58 An authentic locality in the Ukraine and a site of heavy fighting during the Civil War, Lozovaya is dislocated to suburban Moscow in the 1990s while lacking a clear location in 1919. 59 Pelevin, Chapaev i pustota, 121–122.

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The battle of Lozovaya, as represented both on the map and in the text, is the most important and simultaneously the most enigmatic occurrence of Pustota’s voyage. He does not have a clear idea why and against whom this military action was taken and notices the figures of Anna and Chapaev, but not himself, in the drawing. He is especially troubled by the unfilled section of cardboard between the plan of the battle and the train, and in frustration fills in the blank area with black blotches of shrapnel. The mystery of Lozovaya extends into chapter Five (the Civil War) where Pustota regains consciousness from a coma and learns about the battle from Anna, but try as he might, he cannot recall anything about it. His amnesia is the apparent result of trauma.60 However, the void on the drawing and in Pustota’s mind points to a more acute issue in the novel’s metaphysical problematic: the status of “I” and the world this “I” exists in and/or creates. The “gaping void” may imply the illusoriness of the battle, the absence of a transcendental principle (there is mention of the sky), or the enigma of the subject as such. The protagonist’s name is, after all, a resonant one.

Transcendental Spaces (Un)Grounded The novel’s central part takes place an imaginary provincial town, AltaiVidnyansk, beyond the Urals and contains Pelevin’s central philosophical discussions on space, time, and self. Here Chapaev prompts Pustota to think whether he exists because of the world or the world exists because of him. If the entire world exists within him, then where does he exist? And if he exists within this world, then where is his consciousness located?61 Perhaps more engagingly, the Altai-Vidnyansk chapters also feature elaborately warped space-times that further unground linear models of being and self. The oft-discussed passage about Kant (chapter Five) takes on the Kantian categorical imperative, along with the categories of space and time as a priori, to problematize them through ingenious spatial imagery: I saw above me the sky full of stars. It was so beautiful that for several seconds I simply lay there in silence, staring upwards. . . . “Beauty 60 For an analysis of the novel from the perspective of trauma studies, see Noordenbos, “Shocking Histories and Missing Memories.” 61 Pelevin, Chapaev i pustota, 181–182. Conversing on consciousness vis-à-vis space and on personhood, Chapaev performs the same rhetorical maneuver of reducing Pustota’s understanding of these categories to tautologies: “These habits belong to a totality of habits”; “Your consciousness is in your consciousness.” Pelevin, Chapaev i pustota, 171–172. See also Clowes, Russia on the Edge, 77–78.

CHAPTER 2    Space-Time Poetics in Chapaev and the Void is the greatest objectification of the will at the highest level of its cognizability.” Chapaev looked at the sky for another few seconds, then transferred his gaze to a large puddle right by our feet and spit the stub of his cigarette into it. The universe reflected in the even surface of the water suffered a genuine cataclysm—all its constellations shuddered and were momentarily transformed into a blurry twinkle. “What has always amazed me is the starry heaven under my feet and Immanuel Kant within us.”62

The description creates a model of boundlessness (sublimity, if we use Kant’s term): the reflection that adds to the sky above its image under foot removes the surface that delimits space below to create boundless space.63 The passage is saturated with spatial markers: “at the sky,” “puddle right at our feet,” “the universe reflected,” “surface of water,” “constellations,” “heaven under my feet,” “Kant within us.” The surface of the water contains the entire universe. Pelevin plays with the maxim, “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe the more often and the more seriously reflection concentrates upon them: the starry heaven above me and the moral law within me.”64 From Chapaev’s skeptical perspective, what is inherent to humans is not Kant’s categorical imperative, but Kant positing the imperative in question (“Kant within us”). A position that postulates itself as transcendental and absolute is in fact finite and human-made. 62 Pelevin, Chapaev i pustota, 174–175. Several interpretations of this passage have been offered. Among these: (1) Chapaev “scoffs at Kant, misquoting the famous conclusion of Critique of Pure Practical Reason. . . . He finds no use for fixed space and time, which for him are only a dream.” Clowes, Russia on the Edge, 78. (2) The passage “falls in line with the ironization of established discourses favored by postmodernists—throwing doubt on common values.” To sharpen the irony, “the speech act exposed as located and specific is not any random discourse but one that does no less than postulate itself as transcendental law.” Sofya Khagi, “Incarceration, Alibi, Escape? Viktor Pelevin’s Art of Irony,” Russian Literature 76 (2014): 383–384. (3) In the Kant-Schopenhauer debate on morality, in place of the former’s assumption that moral laws exist a priori, the latter proposes that an ethical action arises as an exception to the rule of pure egoism, a realization that you and the other are the same—resembling the concept of compassion in Buddhism.” Julia Vaingurt, “Freedom and the Reality of Others in Chapaev and the Void,” Slavic and East European Journal 62, no. 3 (2018): 478–479. 63 For Lotman, bird’s-eye-view helps construct “super-spacy space.” Similarly, reflected landscape creates as a spatial model of boundlessness. 64 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 2002), 111.

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Pustota’s guru literally turns the immaculate Kantian cosmos topsy-turvy via a spatial trick. By abruptly switching Pustota’s focus from the sky above to the puddle below, he offers an alternative visual counterpart to moral law, one not at all as compelling as the original. How does one reconcile the heavens trampled upon and the categorical imperative within one’s heart? The stub that breaks the smooth surface of the water and “causes a genuine cataclysm” dislocates Pustota’s vision and throws into question his perception of external reality. The stars are a second-order image since, following Kant’s own logic, human perception of the world is mediated through the senses. How do we know where the stars are, or if they are anywhere but “in us”? How do we agree on something as beautiful when what we perceive is dependent on the individual subject? This does not mean, however, that Kant’s categorical imperative is dismissed as based in perceptual illusion. In the Pelevinian solipsistic mindset, reflection is as (un)real as the stars above. The “starry heavens under my feet” (physical space) contrasts with “Kant within us” (psychic space), but only to a point, since it is precisely the dichotomy of the external/internal that is thrown into doubt here. The point is not that the categorical imperative is irrelevant but that, in Kant’s or our own heads, it can be neither derived from unreliable sensory data nor dismissed based on the same. The moral law exists (or does not) based on a subjective human perspective.65 Pustota’s sojourn in Baron Jungern’s Valhalla (chapter Seven) introduces him to a fantastic non-Euclidian/non-Kantian world that uncovers earthly illusions but conceives of the realm beyond the mundane in provisional, chaotic, and gloomy terms. Jungern’s netherworld is sharply twisted and mysterious. The mound-like structure on the steppe is a symbolic boundary that separates ordinary Euclidian space-time from Jungern’s kingdom. The ordinary and the magical realms do not form one continuous space. It is not possible to enter the Valhalla by physically passing through the gate—only by having one’s perception radically transformed. Like Chapaev dislocating Pustota’s vision with his cigarette butt breaking the surface of water, Jungern pushes Pustota hard from behind “as though he were a gate kicked off its hinges,” Pustota feels a spasm across his field of vision and suddenly discerns bright lights in front of him.66 65 Pelevin’s reading is in line with Kant’s understanding of space-time as forms of cognition, rather than as reality independent of one’s consciousness, but departs from the Kantian vision of space and time as transcendental. 66 Pelevin, Chapaev i pustota, 259.

CHAPTER 2    Space-Time Poetics in Chapaev and the Void

The Jungern kingdom pointedly defies Euclidian logic. It is a mathematically precise place in which an infinite number of campfires are separated in a logical way, each fifty paces apart. This regular layout contrasts with Pustota’s inability to traverse the space to the nearest campfire, as in a Kafkaesque or Zeno-like nightmare: We were surrounded by intense darkness and in it, as far the eye could see, were the bright spots of campfires. They were arranged in an unnaturally precise pattern, as though they stood at the intersections of an invisible grid which divided the world up into an infinite number of squares. . . . “Tell me, Baron, why are they all sitting apart, without visiting each other?” “You try walking over to one of them,” said Jungern. . . . I have probably been walking for a minute or two before I realized that I had not moved any closer to the point of bright light towards which I had set out. . . . I clutched at his sleeve and the campfires went hurtling past us once again—our speed was so great that they extended into blurred zigzags and dotted lines. I was more than half-certain that it must be some kind of illusion.67

The way the Jungern field defies ordinary space-time parameters once more dramatizes Pelevin’s motif of solipsism. The universe of Chapaev and the Void is a constellation of innumerable parallel realities formed by individual minds (the protagonist, Kotovsky, Chapaev, Anna, three other inmates of the psychiatric ward, and so forth). That every mind creates a parallel reality of its own is plotted by means of inset novellas written from the perspectives of Simply Maria, Serdyuk, and Volodin, and shared via Timur Timurovich’s collective dream therapy. The same notion is captured, like the mise-en-abyme of Lozovaya, in the Jungern space. If breaking a territory up into plots does not create a break in geometric space, giving these plots the status of belonging to different persons will resist creating a single space of ownership because in the transition from “yours” to “mine” there will be a spatial break.68 The field is a graphic representation of such a fragmented cosmos, not on the level of physical possession, but from the perspective of psychic belonging. The spots of campfires are positioned on a grid dividing the world up into numberless plots. 67 Pelevin, Chapaev i pustota, 258–263. 68 Lotman, “Problema khudozhestvennogo prostranstva v proze Gogolia,” 27.

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These campfires represent individual universes formed by solitary minds.69 All inner segments of the Valhalla are mutually impenetrable, the space has broken up into a mosaic of lost continuity. It only makes sense that the distance from Pustota to the nearest campfire, apparently no more than fifty paces, cannot be traversed without Jungern’s supernatural aid. Crossing into another’s world is impossible by ordinary human means. With its neat Cartesian design, the Valhalla represents a mathematical blueprint of a solipsistic universe, not a world (or otherworld) in any proper manner of speaking. It is just a prop Jungern uses in his lesson to Pustota. As the baron claims, what Pustota encounters is brought into existence by his own mind: “If you discover that you are surrounded by impenetrable darkness, it only means that your own inner space is like night. It’s a good thing that you are an agnostic, or else there would be all manner of gods and devils roaming about in this darkness.”70 The realm where Jungern presides over former warriors is only one of the branches of the world beyond the grave (suggesting multiple such worlds exist), and his mastery over it is suspect since an assortment of murderers and bandits infiltrates it against his knowledge or desire. The Valhalla’s dream-like, illogical and at the same time schematic properties are meant to drive home Chapaev’s and Jungern’s point that everything is an illusion, whether of a collective or an individual nature. As Jungern teaches Pustota, passé his “clear and unambiguous sense of the reality of what is happening,” the Valhalla does not exist—as there are no dual timelines of 1919 and 1990s or indeed anything else (including himself).71 In his formulation, “both of Pustota’s dreams are equally illusory.”72 There is only a nothingness/emptiness/fakery. When Pustota is released from Jungern’s kingdom with a powerful shove of the baron’s arm, “It was as if one set of props was moved aside and the next was not in place immediately, and for an entire second I stared into the gap between them.” This instance proves sufficient for him “to perceive the deception behind what he took for reality, to perceive the 69 The plain “becomes a metaphor for cosmic emptiness filled with innumerable private consciousnesses” (Clowes, Russia on the Edge, 75). A group by one of these campfires consists of Volodin and his gang (the third inset novella). The group’s discussion of “internal cops,” “internal impeachment” etc. is a humorous literalized version of psychic space. Cf. Generation ‘П’: “The main conflict [of geopolitics] is that of the left hemisphere with the right one, which some people’s brains exhibit from birth.” Viktor Pelevin, Generation ‘П’ (Moscow: Vagrius, 1999), 121–122. 70 Pelevin, Chapaev i pustota, 283. 71 Ibid., 266. 72 Ibid.

CHAPTER 2    Space-Time Poetics in Chapaev and the Void

simple and stupid way in which the universe was arranged.”73 The experience of glimpsing the falsehood of existence leaves him filled with confusion, annoyance, and a sense of shame for himself. Pustota neither likes nor trusts Jungern’s lesson. As he suspects, the netherworld with its spatial-temporal tricks may be not only twisted and chaotic but plain fake (per Jungern, that is beside the point). The Valhalla is actually simulacrum-like as if Pustota were watching a movie in CGI or playing a computer game.74 Noteworthy in this respect is that his epiphanic realization of the sham of existence—the very notion Jungern presses upon him—takes place despite the baron’s intentions: “This time around he did not catch me unawares.”75 To be ashamed of one’s naivety for buying into worldly illusions obviously implies the existence of said “one.” Indeed, Jungern is skeptical of Pustota’s ability to learn his radical lesson about non-world and non-self, and offers an easier way out: assuming Pustota likes metaphors (as a poet would), he likens his departure into “nowhere” to release from a psychiatric asylum. If Jungern’s netherworld is perceived skeptically by Pustota, the URAL (the Conditional River of Absolute Love, chapter Nine) functions as the Valhalla’s benign counterpart. The trio of Chapaev, Pustota, and Anna beholds the URAL after Anna destroys false material reality with the help of her Buddhist machine-gun. In contrast to Jungern’s black fragmented space, the magic rainbow of the URAL projects a feeling of boundlessness and all-unity: What I saw was like a flowing stream that glowed with all the colors of the rainbow, a boundlessly broad river that started somewhere in infinity and departed into some infinity. . . . The light it cast on the three of us was extremely bright, but there was nothing blinding or scary in it because it was at the same time grace, happiness, and an endlessly powerful love.76

Entering the URAL implies physical death. The historical Chapaev swam across the Ural and died on the other side. It is also an ascent toward a higher form of being. In Buddhist terms, entering the rainbow stream is the 73 Pelevin, Chapaev i pustota, 273. 74 In its virtual makeup the Jungern underworld is akin to Maria’s Baudrillardian hallucination. 75 Pelevin, Chapaev i pustota, 272. 76 Ibid, 367. It is important that the characters break through earthly illusions at the symbolic border between Europe and Asia. Both “alchemical weddings,” with the West (Simply MariaSchwarzenegger), and the East (Serdyuk-Kawabata) are equally flawed and misguided.

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Chapaev’s death in the Ural River. From the Vasilyev brothers’ film Chapaev (1934). Public domain.

first of the four stages of enlightenment; the Rainbow body is the body of a spiritually enlightened person dissolving at death into a stream of a rainbowcolored light.77 The multicolored current seems inviting to Pustota, but he feels resigned to his solipsistic mindset: if there is nothing but dreaming, what has he wasted his life on? When he does jump into the URAL, his crossover to a higher form of being is swiftly aborted. His movement slows down, the radiance around him fades, and he is catapulted back into the 1990s.

Conclusion As alluring as The Rainbow Stream may be, the episode provides a false climax. It is in the final chapter in the 1990s timeline that the real denouement takes place.78 Pustota, in a polemically recast Nietzschean paradigm, revisits the 77 On the Rainbow Stream, see Khenpo Sodargye, The Diamond Cutter Sutra: A Commentary by Dzogchen Master Khenpo Sodargye (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2020). At the end of The Sacred Book of the Werewolf (Sviashchennaia kniga oborotnia, 2004), its protagonist werefox A Huli breaks through the evil illusory world she herself creates, and escapes into the Rainbow Stream. Then “this world will disappear,” and “she will discover who she really is.” Pelevin, Sviashchennaia kniga oborotnia (Moscow: Eksmo, 2004), 281. 78 Timur Timurovich misreads the destruction of material reality in 1919 as Pustota’s realization of the falsehood of his Civil War hallucinations and releases him from the mental ward as cured. Jungern’s metaphor of a release from the asylum, accordingly, works.

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Tverskoi and the literary café, reads his poetic manifesto “Eternal Non-Return,” succeeds at his second attempt shooting “the crystal sphere of this false world” and exits to Inner Mongolia.79 In a bit of humorous detail it transpires that Pustota’s rival Kotovsky (creator of the obscene post-Soviet world) had gifted Chapaev and his pupil with a bottle of spoiled cognac, which aborted Pustota’s attempt to dissolve in the Rainbow Stream.80 The enigma of Lozovaya is also resolved at last. It turns out to be the station in the Moscow suburbs where Pustota was detained in the psychiatric ward—his victory, then, is his regained freedom. Throughout its course, Chapaev and the Void destabilizes the readers’ ingrained linear Weltanschauung and stimulates them to apprehend alternative planes of being beyond the visible and sensory surface. What are these alternative planes, exactly? Clearly, not some kind of a cosmic-transcendental a realibus ad realiora in the spirit of Silver Age Symbolism, however liberally invoked by Pelevin.81 Overcoming the earthly as rotten and illusory as any good Symbolist would claim reveals not the divine, not even the “enchanted coast, enchanted far away” of Symbolist spiritual-erotic imaginary, but the absolutely motionless point of “I don’t know.”82 More starkly, such transcendence exposes the eponymous emptiness—pustota. The emptiness may be conceived as Buddhist Nirvana or as a postmodern notion of the fluidity/illusoriness of the subject.83 Although the latter appears more nihilist, the reverse might actually be true. The postmodern worldview destabilizes existence and the subject epistemologically, as political and discursive human constructions. The “non-self ” 79 Pelevin, Chapaev i pustota, 396. Inner Mongolia is one more literalization of internalized space. It is “inside anyone who can see the void. . . . It is well worth striving all your life to reach it.” Ibid., 282. 80 Pustota’s drifting in the Rainbow Stream recalls Chapaev’s description of the whirlpool of dreams: “Like a snowflake caught up by the wind, I was born along toward that spot.” “As soon as you are caught by the current of dreams, you become its part. . . . That’s how a dream comes to feel like reality.” Ibid., 370, 351. Is the Rainbow Stream, then, another dream? 81 Per realia ad realiora (also a realibus ad realiora) is Russian poet-philosopher Vyacheslav Ivanov’s definition of Symbolism in his poetry—“through/from the real to the more real.” Pelevin draws on Blok, Solovyev, Bryusov, and other iconic Silver Age figures pragmatically to establish historic coloring and conceptually from an ironic vantage point. 82 Pelevin, Chapaev i pustota, 351. “The enchanted coast, enchanted far away” comes from Blok’s “The Stranger” (“Neznakomka,” 1906). Blok, Sobranie sochinenii, 1:87. 83 For a problematization of personhood in postmodernism/poststructuralism, see, for example, Paul De Man, Aesthetic Ideology, Theory & History of Literature, Vol. 65, Andreij Warminski (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 172–175. Baudrillard’s hyper-real ousting the notion of real represents another postmodern variety of skepticism.

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and “non-world” of Buddhism posit themselves as ontological verities.84 The Buddhist union with nature may be appealing except that there is no nature to unite with and no human to do the uniting.85 Not only does Pelevin’s novel deal with fluid conceptions of personal (and national) identity and bring into existence, only to deconstruct, universes of the mind (as is proper in postmodern fiction), but, more radically, it claims the non-existence of selfhood. Any reading of Pelevin’s novel must stumble against the aporia of the subject discovering its own non-existence. What Chapaev and Baron Jungern teach Pustota is far more disturbing than solipsistic philosophy or postmodern epistemic uncertainty, not to mention the discrete and commonplace post(anti)-Soviet critique of collective visualizations. The point is no longer that there is no reality shared with others and that “what each of us sees in life is only a reflection of his own spirit,” but that anything the self creates does not exist (and, most importantly, not even the self).86 In this light, Alexander Genis’s insightful observation about Pelevin’s “cultivation of a metaphysical reality, which does not exist, but can be created,” does not address the full implications of Buddhist skepticism.87 As Mark Lipovetsky points out, liberation from the falsehoods and indignities of this world means collapsing the self into the negative space of emptiness beyond action or feeling: “The maximally accessible freedom equates with ‘self-erasure,’ the obliteration of ‘I’ and the reality to which this ‘I’ belongs and which it creates.”88 That Pustota aborts his benighted material existence in the convoluted, unresolved manner of emptiness learning 84 Metaphysical nihilism is the position that nothing exists, and that the universe amounts to a void. There has been much debate among scholars whether this is applicable to Buddhist teachings. On these debates, see, for example, Panaiotti, Nietzsche and Buddhist Philosophy, 17–22. 85 Pelevin’s recent novel, Secret Views of Mount Fuji (Tainye vidy na goru Fudzi, 2018) takes a more skeptical stance on Buddhism. Its hero Fyodor is appalled by the emptiness he discovers behind phenomena and affirms his “right for a stable brain-produced hallucination of being that we, humans, have painfully torn from the Universe.” Pelevin, Tainye vidy na goru Fudzi (Moscow: Eksmo, 2018), 351. 86 Pelevin, Chapaev i pustota, 283. Chapaev and Jungern employ Bolshevik-like violence to teach their Zen lessons to Pyotr, as if a radical lesson must be backed up by radical means. Cf. the rewriting of Zhuangzi’s parable and Anna’s destruction of the world with the clay machine gun. 87 Alexander Genis, “Borders and Metamorphoses: Viktor Pelevin in the Context of PostSoviet Literature,” in Russian Postmodernism: New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture, ed. Mkhail Epstein, Alexander Genis, and Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover (New York and Oxford: Berghan Books, 1999), 224. 88 Lipovetskii, Paralogii, 641.

CHAPTER 2    Space-Time Poetics in Chapaev and the Void

that it is empty departs from the familiar Russian philosophical-religious-artistic paradigms enough to discomfit many a reader.89 That said, while the un-grounding of selfhood looms large in Pelevin’s novel, it is not limited to/does not unequivocally embrace that notion. Rather, Buddhist or postmodern uprootedness and classical Russian “visualizations” (apparently still possessing gravitational force) function as weight and counterweight in the novel’s philosophical questing. As argued above, the novel’s alternative space-times are evaluated on the basis of their ability to nurture/ stifle the life of the spirit.90 The event that throws Pustota into the Wheel of Saṃsāra (at least within narrative bounds) to emerge in a lower karmic form/ setting in the 1990s is his murder of an old acquaintance Grigory Von Ernen— invoking Dostoevskian ethical quandaries.91 The battle of Lozovaya is a fight for liberation (and it is won). In addition, playful metaliterary gestures soften the text’s radical teachings. It is Pustota’s artistic leanings that pull him away from Buddhism and solipsism toward human connectedness: “Suddenly the thought struck me that since the very beginning of time I had been doing nothing but lie by the Ural, dreaming one dream after another. But . . . who would read the description of my dreams?”92 As Jungern notes, Pustota loves his metaphors, and in the end, he destroys the false world with his pen-gun.93 Pelevin’s classic is about emptiness but also about art and love. Kotovsky’s entrapment of Pustota in his benighted universe and his comic prevention of his rival turning into a rainbow body (with the help of bad cognac, no less) are in the classical 89 In Pineapple Water for the Beautiful Lady (Ananasnaia voda dlia prekrasnoi damy, 2010) Pelevin continues to grapple with the paradox of discovering that one has no permanent entity and soul: “Who sees that man has no soul and selfhood? . . . The one who perceives this higher truth is the soul, that same beam of eternal constant light that falls on the cash register tape crawling out of the brain with the results of calculations stating that no eternal essence has been detected inside the machine.” Pelevin, Ananasnaia voda dlia prekrasnoi damy (Moscow: Eksmo, 2010), 194. 90 The evaluation of space-times as promoting/suppressing one’s spirituality evokes Lotman’s observation that space possesses symbolic meaning. For Lotman, Dante’s spatial poetics in Commedia Divina does not anticipate non-Euclidian geometry (as per Florensky) but shows that “Behind actual descent or ascent can be glimpsed the spiritual ascent or descent.” Yuri Lotman, Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture (Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001), 179. 91 Pustota thinks about Raskolnikov’s murderous transgression as he watches the avant-garde version of Crime and Punishment in the literary café “Musical Snuffbox.” 92 Pelevin, Chapaev i pustota, 369. Vaingurt’s reading is pertinent here. 93 The pen-gun is analogized to Buddha’s little finger that exposes the falsehood of existence, but it is Pustota the poet who finally destroys “the crystal sphere of this false world,” not the Buddha or Chapaev, a reincarnation of the Buddha.

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vein of competing for a fair lady’s heart.94 The novel’s finale has Pelevin’s hero rushing off with Chapaev upon learning that Anna “sends her greetings” and “awaits some books he has promised her.”95 His Inner Mongolia (Shambhala) is mystic but also physical and geographic. It is beloved: “The whispering sands and roaring waterfalls of Inner Mongolia dear to my heart.”96 And it promises creativity and a beautiful woman reading Pustota’s work, even if on a loan without Bulgakov’s permission. Perhaps the space-time of Inner Mongolia is not a gaping void but the home of one’s dreams.

94 Cf. Azazello poisoning the Master and Margarita in Bulgakov’s novel with the help of Pontius Pilate’s wine as well as the Master’s and Margarita’s reward of peace at the finale of Bulgakov’s novel. 95 Pelevin, Chapaev i pustota, 413. 96 Ibid.

CHAPTER 3

Parody of Past and Present in Chapaev and the Void CHRISTOPHER FORT, AMERICAN UNIVERSITY OF CENTRAL ASIA

P

elevin’s 1996 novel Chapaev and the Void (alternative titles in English are Buddha’s Little Finger and Clay Machine Gun) marks not only his greatest achievement as a novelist, but also a turning point in his career. Prior to this novel, Pelevin was still struggling with what to make of the collapse of the Soviet Union, which had fallen apart five years previous. The disintegration of the USSR also meant the loss of its official literary method, Socialist Realism. The term “Socialist Realism” was first coined in 1932, and over the course of that decade, which coincided with the consolidation of Stalin’s power, the realism it conveyed came to be something other than its obvious connotation. As most scholars of the subject have observed, Socialist Realism conflated “what is” with “what ought to be” such that, throughout the life of the Soviet Union, literary representations replaced reality in official and even unofficial discourse.1 Pelevin’s early oeuvre, explored in a previous chapter, evinces his 1 For more on Socialist Realism and its particular form of mimesis, see Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000); Evgeny Dobrenko, Political Economy of Socialist Realism (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2007); Regine Robin, Socialist Realism: An Impossible Aesthetic, ed. Catherine Porter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992). For more on how ordinary people used the language of the Soviet state to represent their own realities, see the works of those included in the school of Soviet subjectivity. These include Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution On My Mind: Writing a Diary Under Stalin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Oleg Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of

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fascination with Socialist Realism’s representational power and its influence on ordinary Soviet subjects. Chapaev and the Void is Pelevin’s last major address to Socialist Realism and the Soviet Union’s foundational myths because, after this point, for Pelevin, Soviet history became a part of broader Russian history.2 As Angela Brintlinger notes in her article analyzing Pelevin and Vladimir Makanin’s reinvigoration of the Russian literary figure of the madman in the 1990s, part of Pelevin’s objective in the novel is the articulation of a post-Soviet Russian literary canon that integrates the official Soviet canon, its unofficial alternatives, and the pre-Soviet canon.3 Concerned as he is with post-Soviet existence, in Chapaev and the Void Pelevin places his satire of Socialist Realist myths side by side with a satire of new myths around which Russians were attempting to restructure their identities. Pelevin satirizes notions of both the Soviet and post-Soviet Russian self to advance his own view of what the new Russian self should be: one that rejects externally imposed identities for solipsism—or in Alexander Genis’s terms, “cultivation of a metaphysical reality, which does not exist, but can be created.”4 Chapaev and the Void follows the main protagonist, Pyotr Pustota, as he dreams between the 1990s and the Russian Civil War (1917–1921). If we adhere to the most realistic reading of the novel, Pustota is a patient in a 1990s Russian psychiatric hospital, who, without the Soviet order to structure his life, has lost his grip on reality. As the hospital psychiatrist, Timur Timurovich Kanashnikov, asks him: “Why do some people actively strive, as it were, towards the new, while others persist in their attempts to clarify their

Practices (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999); Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as Civilization (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995); Igal Halfin, From Darkness to Light: Class, Consciousness, and Salvation in Revolutionary Russia (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999); Anna Krylova, “Imagining Socialism in the Soviet Century,” Social History 42, no. 3 (2017): 315–341. 2 While his interest in the relationship between representation and reality would never leave him, by 1996 the mythology of Socialist Realism was no longer as relevant to Pelevin or other Russians’ post-Soviet existence. What was the point of taking apart Soviet representations, satirizing and parodying them, if the Soviet state built on these representations no longer existed? 3 Angela Brintlinger, “The Hero in the Madhouse: The Post-Soviet Novel Confronts the Soviet Past,” Slavic Review 63, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 43–65. 4 Alexander A. Genis, “Borders and Metamorphoses: Viktor Pelevin in the Context of PostSoviet Literature,” in Russian Postmodernism: New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture, ed. Mikhail N. Epstein, Alexander A. Genis, and Slobodanka M. Vladiv-Glover (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1999), 224.

CHAPTER 3    Parody of Past and Present in Chapaev and the Void

non-existent relations with the shadows of a vanished world?”5 But to Pustota, the psychiatric hospital is a dream from which he awakens to an authentic reality. In his mind he is repeatedly transported to the time of the Russian Civil War, in which he is companion to the Red Army commander Vasily Chapaev (1887–1919).6 Pustota takes the place of his namesake Petka (a nickname for Pyotr), Chapaev’s sidekick in the Furmanov novel and the Vasilyev brothers’ film based on the novel. By making dreams the novel’s central trope, Pelevin parodies the everconscious Socialist Realist hero who is consistently depicted as an insomniac. He never sleeps and, naturally, never dreams because, for Stalinist thinkers, sleep and dream indicated the intrusion of alternative consciousnesses, necessarily false ones, into Soviet reality. Pelevin parodies this aspect of Socialist Realism by portraying dreams not as false consciousnesses but as pathways into alternate realities, all of which are false. Unlike the Socialist Realist hero, who follows a linear path from false consciousness to a true class consciousness, Pustota discovers the falsehood of all consciousness. As the Russian cultural critic Mark Lipovetsky has argued, Pelevin’s late 1980s and early 1990s texts follow their heroes as they deconstruct the simulacra of Soviet reality, uncover the emptiness behind them, and then, rather than discarding it, undergo a ritual initiation and rebirth.7 Lipovetsky here speaks of early works such as Omon Ra (1992), but Chapaev and the Void largely fits the pattern.8 Pustota comes to understand that reality is a simulacrum behind which there is nothing. With the novel’s conclusion, he experiences a kind of rebirth as he leaves his 1919 reality for Inner Mongolia. Once he discovers that consciousness is a void, Pustota exercises his personal agency to destroy the falsity of realities. The fact that the self cannot be known but individual agency can be exercised is something of an aporia in Pelevin’s thought. After all, what agency can there be if the self is entirely a fiction? Pelevin does not make his characters struggle with this question. Once they have learned how to choose solipsism, they do not inquire whether they are the ones choosing it. Victor Pelevin, Buddha’s Little Finger, trans. Andrew Bromfield (New York: Penguin, 2001), 33; Viktor Pelevin, Chapaev i Pustota (Moscow: Vagrius, 1996), 47. 6 Chapaev was best known to Soviet readers by way of the classic Socialist Realist novel Chapaev (1923) by the proletarian author Dmitry Furmanov (1891–1926), and from the subsequent 1934 film adaptation of the novel. 7 Mark Lipovetskii, Paralogii: Transformatsii (post)modernistkogo diskursa v russkoi kul᾿ture 1920–2000-kh godov (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2008), 411. 8 As do later novels such as The Sacred Book of the Werewolf (Sviashchennaia kniga oborotnia, 2004). 5

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Nevertheless, this individual agency is found in that destruction for Pelevin is also a form of creation. Pelevin’s hero destroys other realities with his art and by so doing creates his own metaphysical reality. Pustota’s arrival at a rejection of social consciousness for an individual reality of his own making happens not only through Chapaev’s guidance, but also through the dreams of his fellow inmates in the psychiatric hospital.9 His three fellow dreamers each conceptualize alternative communal visions of the post-Soviet present. As Edith Clowes points out in her interpretation of the novel through the lens of Lacanian psychoanalysis, “each inmate’s fantasy of self fits as a fragmented part of an allegory of the national-imperial psyche.”10 Pelevin discredits the dreamers’ ideologies and their concomitant Russian communal identities. Ultimately, he demonstrates that post-Soviet Russia no longer has the power to create a convincing reality like the Soviet Union’s. Individuals are now best served by embracing a reality of their own creation.

Socialist Realist Dreams and “Vera Pavlovna’s Ninth Dream” Sleep, dream, and insomnia interested Pelevin in his early career because they were crucial tropes in the Russian literary and Socialist Realist canons.11 In their article on the mythology of everyday life under Stalin, Aleksandr Kuliapin and Olga Skubach argue that Stalinism witnessed a turn in Russian culture’s 9 Julia Vaingurt reminds that Pelevin’s characters only achieve their solipsism with the participation of other consciousnesses, and the fact that Pustota travels through the dreams of his fellow psychiatric patients to reach his self-actualization is good proof of her argument. See Julia Vaingurt, “Freedom and the Reality of Others in Chapaev and the Void,” Slavic and East European Journal 62, no. 3 (2018): 466–482. 10 Edith W. Clowes, Russia on the Edge: Imagined Geographies and Post-Soviet Identities (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2011), 81. Alternatively, Sofya Khagi discusses these dreams as “meta-alternative histories.” They are meta-alternative histories, because, whereas alternative histories represent scenarios intended to help communities work through problems of historical trauma and identity, these dreamers present “parallel realities formed by [the dreamers’] individual consciousness.” See Sofya Khagi, “Alternative Historical Imagination in Viktor Pelevin,” Slavic and East European Journal 62, no. 3 (2018): 484. 11 This is not to say that Pelevin draws only on Socialist Realism in Chapaev and the Void and other works of his early oeuvre. Through its hospital psychiatrist’s collective dream analyses, Pelevin’s novel obviously plays on Jung’s notion of the collective unconscious, about which, Jung argued, dreams provided insights. Interested as Pelevin is in Eastern philosophies, such as Buddhism and Daoism, their interpretations of dreams also influence the author’s use of the trope. In Chapaev and the Void, Pelevin notably contemporizes and plays with the parable presented by the second great Daoist philosopher, Zhuangzi, about his inability to distinguish waking life from dreaming.

CHAPTER 3    Parody of Past and Present in Chapaev and the Void

relationship to sleep and dream. In the 1930s, Russian culture rejected “the sagacious dreams of Vera Pavlovna” for “the cult of Rakhmetov’s sleeplessness.”12 Rakhmetov and Vera Pavlovna are the heroes of the 1863 novel What is to Be Done? (Chto delat’?) by the Russian revolutionary and rationalist Nikolai Chernyshevsky (1828–1889). While Stalinist litterateurs never referred to the text as part of the Socialist Realist canon, as the favorite novel of many a Russian revolutionary, including Lenin, it provided the basis for many of the tropes found in Socialist Realist literature, tropes that Pelevin would parody in the 1990s.13 Socialist Realism drew primarily on the figure of Rakhmetov, but Vera Pavlovna was not forgotten. In Chernyshevsky’s novel, she has four famous dreams, the fourth of which offers a vision of a distant utopian future lived according to the author’s understanding of rational rules for human behavior. From childhood, Soviet citizens were trained to read Vera Pavlovna’s dream as a prophecy that was ultimately fulfilled by the Russian Revolution in 1917.14 Vera Pavlovna’s role in Soviet culture did not escape Pelevin, who parodied it in a 1991 short story, “Vera Pavlovna’s Ninth Dream” (“Deviatyi son Very Pavlovny”), part of his Blue Lantern (Sinii fonar᾿) collection. Pelevin’s protagonist is the cleaner of a men’s toilet, and her dreams are far more mundane than her nineteenth-century counterpart’s. In lieu of utopia, she dreams of a slightly improved lavatory. Her friend informs her that Vera can transform her reality through solipsism, a retreat into a reality of her own making. Through the power of solipsistic creation, Vera mentally beautifies her toilet, which subsequently becomes privatized during perestroika, with classical music and paintings. However, the excrement eventually seeps through into her self-created reality, and she is condemned at the Last Judgment to be a piece of Socialist Realist prose. She becomes the ninth dream of Vera Pavlovna, studied by Soviet schoolchildren. Much as in Chapaev and the Void a few year later, “Vera Pavlovna’s Ninth Dream” represents dreams as entryways into alternative consciousnesses and 12 A. I. Kuliapin and O. A. Skubach, “V strane sovetskoi zhit᾿: mifologiia povsednevnoi zhizni 1920–1950 g.,” Kritika i semiotika 11 (2007): 322. 13 For more on the importance of Chernyshevsky’s What is to Be Done? to Russian revolutionaries, see Adam Weiner, How Bad Writing Destroyed the World: Ayn Rand and the Literary Origins of the Financial Crisis (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016). 14 For more on how Soviet readers were instructed to read texts, see Evgeny Dobrenko, The Making of the State Reader: Social and Aesthetic Contexts of the Reception of Russian Literature, trans. Jesse Savage (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997).

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a world of the individual’s making. In Pelevin’s parody, Vera’s dreams are opposed to the collective simulacra of Socialist Realism because they are her individual creations. At the same time, Vera’s dreams are very like Socialist Realist simulacra. By mentally redecorating her lavatory, Vera exercises the same power to paper over reality that Socialist Realism exercised in Soviet society under Stalin. Pelevin drives home the likeness between Vera’s solipsism and Socialist Realist simulacra when his narrator states of Vera Pavlovna’s reimagination of her toilet’s new adornments that “life was gradually becoming better.”15 This is a paraphrase of Stalin’s famous 1935 quote, “Life has become better, comrades. Life has become more cheerful.”16 Stalin’s statement contains an inherent irony because the dictator pronounced it on the eve of the Great Terror, the purges of 1936 to 1938 in which as many as one and half million were arrested and half that number executed.17 Life was certainly not becoming more cheerful. Both Soviet and Vera’s simulacra conceal a much grimmer reality. In this story, the Soviet Union has the last laugh: it crushes Vera’s solipsistic simulacrum and reincorporates her into the Soviet collective narrative as a morality tale.

Socialist Realism, Insomnia, and Consciousness Chernyshevsky’s other hero, the ever-conscious Rakhmetov, would lay the groundwork for Socialist Realism and the Soviet cult of sleeplessness and avoidance of dream. Rakhmetov appears only briefly toward the end of Chernyshevsky’s long volume.18 Chernyshevsky relays his character’s status as a revolutionary not through his actions but through his preparations. Rakhmetov subjects his mind and body entirely to the revolutionary cause. He leads an ascetic, puritanical life, abstaining from all luxuries that the common man does not enjoy. He performs incredible feats of physical strength. And, importantly, he foregoes sleep. Chernyshevsky notes that Rakhmetov frequently spends nights reading instead of sleeping. When he actually sleeps, 15 Viktor Pelevin, “Deviatyi son Very Pavlovny,” in Sinii fonar᾿(Moscow: Tekst, 1991), 144; Victor Pelevin, The Blue Lantern and Other Stories, trans. Andrew Bromfield (New York: New Directions, 1997), 109. I have here provided my own translation rather than Bromfield’s to indicate the similarity to Stalin’s phrasing. 16 Vadim Serov, “Zhit᾿stalo luchshe, zhit᾿stalo veselee,” in Entsiklopedicheskii slovar᾿krylatykh slov i vyrazhenii (Moscow: Lokid-Press, 2006), 258. 17 For a thorough accounting of the scale of Stalinist terror, see Moshe Lewin, The Soviet Century, ed. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2016), 106–112. 18 The author fully intended for audiences to interpret the character as a revolutionary, but he could not outright show his creation in this fashion, for he wrote the novel while imprisoned.

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Rakhmetov does so in a manner that reveals his will to overcome the very human need for sleep. He is shown sleeping on planks, and in his most memorable feat, on a bed of nails. Under Stalin, the revolutionary triumph over sleep pioneered by Chernyshevsky would become a repeated trope. Sleeplessness came to characterize Stalin and the Bolshevik leadership in popular culture. Soviet artists and litterateurs repeatedly depicted Stalin and his lieutenants as sleepless because that insomnia symbolized their vigilance in defending the revolution. Metaphorically, Stalin, like a night watchman, stood guard over the sleep of Soviet citizens. In 1940 Viktor Govorkov created the well-known poster “Stalin is looking after all of us from the Kremlin,” portraying Stalin in this fashion [see Image 1]. In the poster, Stalin sits at his desk in the Kremlin writing. His desk lamp is on, while we see through the window that it is night.19

V. Govorkov. “Stalin is looking after all of us from the Kremlin,” 1940.

Naturally, the Bolshevik heroes of Socialist Realist art came to imitate the sleeplessness that Soviet discourse attributed to Lenin and Stalin. Sergei Ivagin, 19 The representation of Soviet leaders as insomniacs was so widespread that many Soviet anecdotes played on it. One example: Lenin once told his mistress (Inessa Armand) that he was spending the night with his wife (Nadezhda Krupskaya), and his wife that he was spending the night with his mistress, but in fact he spent the night “in the attic, working, working, and working.”

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the intellectual protagonist of Fyodor Gladkov’s classic 1925 novel Cement (Tsement), spends his nights reading, of course, Lenin’s 1909 Materialism and Empirio-criticism (Materializm i empiriokrititsizm).20 Like Stalin in Govorkov’s poster, Levinson, the hero commander of Aleksandr Fadeev’s 1927 novel The Rout (Razgrom), stands watch over his sleepy detachment, preparing for the battle he knows is coming.21 Pavel Korchagin and the other protagonists of Nikolai Ostrovsky’s 1936 novel How the Steel Was Tempered (Kak zakalialas᾿ stal᾿) are always “losing sleep,” “forgetting about sleep and rest,” or surviving multiple “sleepless nights.”22 And, of course, Klychkov, Dmitry Furmanov’s avatar in his 1923 novel Chapaev, spends sleepless nights doing party agitation work.23 Describing Bolshevik insomnia in their 2007 study, Kuliapin and Skubach give many reasons for the creation and persistence of this trope in Stalinist culture. Soviet citizens, their readings suggest, did not sleep because sleep implied an individuation that cut a person off from the collective. Additionally, Soviet leadership and members of the party were to avoid sleep more than others because they had to watch over the citizenry. The enemies of the people never slept and thus communists always had to be vigilant. The most important reason for this myth—and the most significant for Pelevin’s parody—was that “the sleep of the dreamer [in Soviet literature] . . . gives rise to the [Soviet] unconscious, vestiges of the past, things pre-Soviet, and strange thoughts.”24 Socialist Realism, in fact, sustained a metaphor that equated class consciousness with waking consciousness. The class-conscious communist had to remain awake and vigilant. In this metaphor, the Soviet unconscious became a false consciousness. A communist could not sleep because sleep opens the door for false consciousness to slip into the Soviet present. 20 Fedor Vasil᾿evich Gladkov, “Tsement,” in Sochineniia v piati tomakh, vol. 1 (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel᾿stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1950), 341. 21 Aleksandr Fadeev, Razgrom (Moscow: Izdatel᾿stvo Ordena “Znak pocheta,” 1976), 36. 22 Nikolai Ostrovskii, Kak zakalialas᾿stal’ (Moscow: Izdatel᾿stvo Ordena “Znak pocheta,” 1976), 11, 177, 182, 198. 23 Dmitrii Furmanov, Chapaev (Moscow: Pravda, 1968), 41–42. Importantly, the trope of Bolshevik sleeplessness continued in Soviet art well past Stalin’s lifetime. The 1979 crime serial The Meeting Place Cannot be Changed (Mesto vstrechi izmenit᾿nel᾿zia), which features the well-known poet and bard Vladimir Vysotskii (1938–1980) as the experienced gumshoe Gleb Zheglov, shows his young protégé, the naïve communist idealist, Vladimir Sharapov (Vladimir Konkin), awake reading deep into the night. 24 Kuliapin and Skubach, “V strane sovetskoi zhit᾿: mifologiia povsednevnoi zhizni 1920– 1950 g.,” 328.

CHAPTER 3    Parody of Past and Present in Chapaev and the Void

We observe the entrance of such vestiges of the past in Socialist Realist canonical novels when protagonists drop their vigilance for a moment and fall asleep. When Pavel Korchagin of How the Steel Was Tempered is knocked unconscious, he dreams of a blood-sucking octopus enveloping him, an obvious allusion to common international socialist depictions and tropes of capitalism or imperialism as tentacled creatures [see, for example, Image 2].25 Sleep similarly permits the entrance of the past into the Soviet world in Gladkov’s Cement. When one of the novel’s characters, Polina, suffers at night from a waking dream, she hears the cries of petty bourgeoisie, gamblers, and mercantilists, whom, she laments, Lenin’s temporary New Economic Policy had allowed to return.26 In Furmanov’s Chapaev, the Whites come out to kill villagers and unsuspecting Red Army members only at night. In one instance, Furmanov uses the phrase “v chadu” (in the smoke-filled atmosphere) to lend their nighttime raids a phantasmagoric tint.27 These creatures of past systems of economic development encroach on Soviet lands and minds only when communists lose consciousness.

Pashtanika, “More Power to the Arm,” Industrial Pioneer, October 1921, 2. Public domain.

25 Ostrovskii, Kak zakalialas᾿stal᾿, 167. For an example of the tentacled menace of capitalism in the 1920s, recall Mayakovsky’s lines in his 1918 play Mystery-Bouffe (Misteria-Buff): “merchants’ tentacles emerged from shops./ The heart of the bazaars pulsated with evil.” 26 Gladkov, “Tsement,” 315–317. 27 Furmanov, Chapaev, 265–366.

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Socialist Realism did not just divide the world between the sleepers and the sleepless; it also held a third category, that of spontaneity. This category is critical to understanding Pelevin’s 1996 version of Chapaev. The canonical novels adhere to what Katerina Clark calls Socialist Realism’s “master plot” and realize an allegory of the Marxist-Leninist historical dialectic whereby “spontaneity” (stikhiinost᾿—also translated as “elementalness”) is transformed into class consciousness. Marxist-Leninists held that the underclasses, the peasants and the proletariat, expressed their rage against their masters in a spontaneous, unfocused fashion: peasant revolts, urban insurrections, small rebellions, and so forth. They needed tutelage from a vanguard class of intellectuals to hone their unfocused power into conscious action that would establish socialism. In Socialist Realist literature, this spontaneity is expressed allegorically in a hero who possesses raw power but is often impulsive. A proper class consciousness (and consequently, sleeplessness) has yet to emerge. With the help of the vanguard, often in the form of a Bolshevik instructor acting as a surrogate parent, he becomes conscious, joins his power with that of the working masses, and achieves victory over class enemies.28 This dialectic dictates the plot of Furmanov’s novel Chapaev and provides some of the fodder for Pelevin’s parody of the character in 1996. Furmanov portrays the historical Red Army commander, in whose unit the author served as political commissar, as one such spontaneous character. He writes of Chapaev: Chapaev was one of those with whom it was relatively easy to live peacefully. But with him one could just as easily part ways abruptly. Oh, he could kick up a din, make a fuss, strike down any insult with a rejoinder of his own, tongue-lash, inflame onlookers, tear everything to pieces, regretting nothing, not looking past his own nose in a furious, blind madness.29

Furmanov associates this primal, blind strength with an inclination toward destruction and chaos. As he is, Chapaev can only destroy, not build, and therefore his personality, his interests are empty and meaningless. Describing Chapaev’s favorite activity, of singing, the narrator notes: “The song came to an end just as tattered, empty, and vapid as it had begun.”30 28 Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual, 15–24. 29 Furmanov, Chapaev, 105. All translations from the Russian are the author’s own. 30 Ibid., 74.

CHAPTER 3    Parody of Past and Present in Chapaev and the Void

The spontaneous hero or masses are often depicted as sleepy and in need of awakening by a Bolshevik, as Klychkov notes of Chapaev above, but they can also exhibit untamed power that drives them to sleeplessness. In Socialist Realist novels, these characters occupy a point on a linear path. They are to traverse the Marxist-Leninist dialectic from spontaneity to consciousness, from sleepiness to sleeplessness, and from destruction to construction. Fyodor Klychkov, Furmanov’s avatar, serves both as Chapaev’s political commissar and his Bolshevik master. As is typical in Socialist Realism, Klychkov believes it is his duty to transform Chapaev’s inclination to destroy into a positive, constructive force by awakening him to class consciousness: “Here Fyodor [Klychkov] knew he had the advantage and was convinced already that if only he managed to awaken Chapaev—then Chapaev’s song, the song of an anarchist and partisan, would be sung, and he could carefully but persistently draw Chapaev to other thoughts, awaken an interest in him for other things.”31 In this way Klychkov works towards harnessing Chapaev’s wild destructiveness to positive political activity, the construction of the new order.

Pelevin’s Chapaev and the Dreamer Pustota Pelevin parodies these tropes of Socialist Realism and Chapaev specifically by transforming the very qualities that Furmanov’s Klychkov dislikes in Chapaev into positive ones. Chapaev’s sleepiness, his inclination toward destruction and nothingness in Furmanov’s novel manifest themselves in unexpected ways in Pelevin’s Chapaev. Playing a reversed role of tutor to Pyotr Pustota rather than student to Klychkov, Pelevin’s Chapaev instructs Pustota to realize that social consciousness, a reality shared with others, is a fiction behind which is a void or nothingness, and that the individual must realize their power to destroy the fiction of objective reality. Pelevin’s version of the character occupies the same point on the path between sleep and sleeplessness, but in Chapaev and the Void, his inclination toward destruction and nothingness points Pustota down a different, non-linear path. Writing on Pelevin’s work of the early 1990s (before Chapaev and the Void), Alexander Genis suggests that Pelevin’s art exhibits not a linear, but a “centripetal” teleology. It thrives on boundaries—transgressing them, crossing them, and destroying them—and it is in this crossing or destruction that individuals find liberation. Genis dubs this path “centripetal,” because it leads to an inward center, toward discovery of a personal, not national or class, freedom.32 31 Furmanov, Chapaev, 111. 32 Genis, “Borders and Metamorphoses,” 225,

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In Chapaev and the Void, Chapaev does not direct Pustota along the path of Socialist Realism from individual to collective consciousness, but teaches him that within each dream, or each reality, is the possibility of negation. Pustota’s realization of this power to negate and destroy realities gains him freedom. We see the beginnings of the path toward freedom in one of Chapaev’s conversations with Pustota in which he explains the falsehood of objective reality. While Furmanov’s Klychkov desires to awaken Chapaev to a shared reality of class consciousness, Pelevin’s Chapaev teaches that to be awakened by others is simply to enter a new false reality, a consciousness of another’s making: “‘If they wake you from your nightmares . . . , Petka,’ Chapaev said without opening his eyes, ‘all that’ll happen is you’ll drop from one dream into another. You have been flitting to and fro like that all eternity’.”33 Chapaev uses the subjectless third-person plural in Russian (razbudiat) rather than a reflexive verb (prosnesh᾿sia), which the translator Andrew Bromfield correctly renders as “they wake up.” “They wake up” implies that others, outside the person being awakened, are the agents, an important fact for Pelevin. For others to “wake someone up” is to enter a consciousness that belongs to another, to subordinate the individual will to a class, nation, or other larger community. The near-identical scenes with which the novel is bookended emphasize the message that Chapaev here implies. The first chapter opens in Pustota’s 1919 dream reality. At the end of that chapter he reads a poem and fires at the chandelier in the “Musical Snuffbox” café. He misses, but Zherbunov, the Party man who accompanies him there and who is, in the following chapter, his orderly in the 1990s mental hospital, steps in immediately and shoots it down.34 At that point Pustota falls asleep and awakens into his reality in the 1990s mental hospital. This scene, in which his shot is completed by another, contrasts with the scene at the end of the novel, when Pustota leaves the mental hospital for the “John Bull International” bar (in the 1990s timeline), where he again reads a poem and shoots at the chandelier, this time hitting it himself. 33 Pelevin, Buddha’s Little Finger, 206; idem, Chapaev i Pustota, 250. 34 The implied logical reading of Zherbunov’s dual role is that Pustota’s dream work incorporates his 1990s orderly into his 1919 dream reality. In his Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Freud lists four sources of dream material, which are: “(1) external (objective) sensory excitations; (2) internal (subjective) sensory excitations; (3) internal (organic) somatic stimuli; and (4) purely psychical sources of stimulation.” Numbers 1 or 4 are the mostly likely causes of Zherbunov’s presence in both realities. See Sigmund Freud, “The Interpretation of Dreams (First Part),” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, vol. 4 (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1953), 22.

CHAPTER 3    Parody of Past and Present in Chapaev and the Void

Soon after he destroys it, he transfers (metaphorically awakens), to the reality he desires, his 1919 reality with Chapaev.35 The implication is that in the beginning of the novel, others’ actions, not his own, precipitate Pustota’s awakening into his 1990s existence, while at the end of the novel, he employs his own agency to destroy a false reality, transferring himself to his desired existence with Chapaev and away from the 1990s. As the example of shooting down the chandelier suggests, it is the violent destruction of a reality that leads to awakening into another reality. The positive emphasis on destruction once again turns Furmanov’s novel on its head, while embracing Furmanov’s character Chapaev. The Chapaev of the 1923 novel has the power to “tear everything to pieces, regretting nothing.” While Pustota hits the chandelier in the novel’s conclusion to metaphorically awaken himself, Chapaev revels in destruction as an act of awakening throughout the novel. Several times we see him with his nickel-plated Mauser unexpectedly shoot something, causing an explosion and forcing Pustota to stagger backwards.36 In Pelevin’s version, Chapaev’s destructive nature is no longer an impediment to awakening but the key to it. Chapaev’s final shot in the novel is one such example. When Baron Yungern near the novel’s end introduces Pustota to the concept of Inner Mongolia, he does not explain the concept, but instead provides a demonstration. He pulls out an inkwell, throws it into the air, and shoots. When the air clears of ink, the Baron is gone, while Chapaev “toys with his smoking Mauser.”37 The act of shooting precipitates a change in consciousness. Destruction reveals the truth behind the impression of objective reality, that is, a gaping void. While the void is an essential part of Pelevin’s philosophy, it, too, is in part a play on Furmanov’s novel. Furmanov ties Chapaev’s spontaneous, destructive nature, to emptiness. Playing on this, Pelevin’s Chapaev points to emptiness with a philosophy that preaches reality is nothing. The hero’s name (pustota—“emptiness” in Russian) hints that even individual consciousness is a fiction. Pelevin’s Chapaev reveals the reason for Pustota’s name when he disproves to his pupil the existence of an individual psyche in something of a pseudo-Socratic dialectic: 35 As are other elements of the novel, such as Pustota’s confinement in a psychiatric ward and Chapaev’s Mauser, the shooting of the chandelier is an allusion to Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita (first published in censored form serially from 1966 to 1967). 36 Each time the act of destruction seems to interrupt the course of events and make a sudden course change, but, in fact, that surprising violent act is not an interruption at all. 37 Pelevin, Buddha’s Little Finger, 236; idem, Chapaev i Pustota, 285.

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Part Two    Space, Time, History “What do you call ‘I’?” “Clearly, myself.” “Can you tell me who you are?” “Pyotr Pustota.” “That’s your name. But who is it that bears that name?”38

Chapaev leads Pustota, as he often does, into a tautology. The hero identifies his “I” with “his collection of habits” and then defines “his collection of habits” as the same. The tautology evidences the nothingness that Pyotr’s surname indicates. Chapaev later tautologizes consciousness by arguing that it is located within itself, and is thus a “nowhere.”39 Playing on the inclination towards nothingness of Furmanov’s Chapaev, Pelevin thus has his Chapaev reveal his student’s nothingness or “nowhere.” But what does this “nowhere” mean and how does one find it (or not find it)? Pelevin’s Chapaev suggests that, in repeatedly awakening from one reality into another, as Pustota does throughout the novel, one can encounter an immutable essence within the sea of mutability: “You don’t realize when you are drawn into the whirlpool because you are moving along together with the water and it appears to be motionless. That’s how a dream comes to feel like reality. But there is a point which is not merely motionless relative to everything else, but absolute motionlessness, and it’s called “I don’t know.” When you hit it in a dream you wake up.”40

38 Pelevin, Buddha’s Little Finger, 139; idem, Chapaev i Pustota, 171. This dialogue hinting at the nature of Pelevin’s tautological notion of self-discovery is echoed in the author’s 2004 novel, The Sacred Book of the Werewolf. There the protagonist of the novel, the fox-spirit and prostitute A Hu-Li, asks the Yellow Master, a monk of the Yellow Mountain Buddhist monastery, about the Rainbow Stream, but the Yellow Master answers that the Rainbow Stream can be understood only via the super-werewolf and the super-werewolf only via the Rainbow Stream. 39 In her address of this interaction between the novel’s principal characters, Clowes convincingly reads Chapaev’s tautology as Pelevin’s Buddhist answer to Kant’s definition of consciousness. In his Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Kant argued that the mind’s ability to structure time and space provides the preconditions for consciousness, but Chapaev argues, as a Buddhist, that consciousness “is a state existing beyond a single mind that, as such, exists nowhere.” Clowes, Russia on the Edge: Imagined Geographies and Post-Soviet Identities, 77. 40 Pelevin, Buddha’s Little Finger, 294; idem, Chapaev i Pustota, 351.

CHAPTER 3    Parody of Past and Present in Chapaev and the Void

Importantly, this absolutely motionless point is not “I” but “I don’t know.” For Pelevin, a person’s “I” can never be defined without resort to a tautology. Selfdiscovery and freedom are achieved by negation and destruction. By stating “I don’t know,” the individual rejects the realities and consciousnesses presented to them. They do not arrive at a greater knowledge of self or consciousness, but rather at a means of exercising agency in the world. Although Pelevin draws on the spontaneous nature of Furmanov’s Chapaev to illustrate destruction as an expression of individual agency, he develops his character beyond its Socialist Realist namesake. While Furmanov posits destruction and construction as opposites—the latter can only occur once Klychkov has developed Chapaev’s consciousness—the post-modernist Pelevin sees destruction as conflated with creation. Once apprised of the falseness of the world, an individual can actively create a world of their own. We see this in the novel’s conclusion: when Pustota successfully shoots down the chandelier, destroying false reality, he recognizes this act as his form of creative agency: “At last, I thought as I crawled towards the wings, at last I had managed to hit the chandelier! But—my God!—was that not always the only thing of which I had been capable, shooting at the mirror-surfaced sphere of this false world with a fountain pen? What a profound symbol, I thought.”41 At first Pustota laments that his agency is found only in an act of destruction, but immediately questions his conclusion, reading it as a “profound symbol.” By having his hero destroy the false world, after reading a poem that he has written, Pelevin suggests that Pustota’s creativity, symbolized by the pen-made-gun, negates false realities as well as creates new ones. The only difference between his art and the simulacra that dress up reality is that the former is his own. Even a false reality can be liberating when chosen of one’s own accord.42 Pelevin’s novel is, then, not idle play with the tropes in Furmanov’s novel, but a means to express his own solipsistic philosophy. Chapaev and the Void rejects Socialist Realism’s linear process from spontaneity or false consciousness to class consciousness, and instead offers a centripetal process as the 41 Pelevin, Buddha’s Little Finger, 332; idem, Chapaev i Pustota, 396. 42 Pelevin’s The Sacred Book of the Werewolf ends on a similar note in which A Hu-Li declares her intention to commit a seemingly suicidal act that will result in the destruction of the world she has created. However, unlike in Chapaev and the Void, in which characters do not discover the self so much as a means of agency, here A Hu-Li explicitly declares “I shall discover who I really am.” See Victor Pelevin, The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, trans. Andrew Bromfield (New York: Viking, 2008), 333; Viktor Pelevin, Sviashchennaia kniga oborotnia (Moscow: Eksmo, 2004), 381.

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protagonist embraces individual agency. Once they have learned how to choose solipsism, they do not inquire whether they are the ones choosing it. Despite this, the novel asserts that freedom is located not in awakening into the right consciousness but in individual destruction and creation.

Discrediting Contemporary Ideologies Pelevin presents an allegorical understanding of solipsism in his satire of the potential communal identities of the Russian nation and state in the 1990s. The dreams of Pustota’s fellow inmates in the mental hospital each represent different visions of Russia’s post-Soviet collective self, what the hospital’s psychiatrist refers to as an “alchemical marriage” between civilizations. The dreamers offer readers Russia as a Western civilization, Russia as an Eastern civilization, and Russia as a neo-Stalinist civilization. Each character seeks in these marriages to restore an aspect of the Soviet state that has been lost with its collapse. Pelevin’s satire frustrates and discredits these civilizational joinings, showing that they cannot compensate for the loss. Pustota’s 1919 dreams satirize yet another ideology, neo-Eurasianism, an ideology that presents Russia as a liminal state between East and West.43 Pelevin’s satire of potential national ideologies leads once again to the author’s advocacy of Pustota’s retreat into his own world. With his dream-satires, Pelevin first discredits the “alchemical marriage” of Russia and the West by portraying the West as sexually dominating and emasculating Russia. We see this in the dream of a man calling himself “Simply Maria,” who has taken on the identity of the female protagonist of the then-popular Mexican soap opera of the same name. Simply Maria’s new identity emerges directly from the post-Soviet identity crisis. The novel’s military psychiatrist, Colonel Smirnov, states that Simply Maria took on his new identity after being hit by a piece of shrapnel that ricocheted into the window of his apartment as the military shelled the Duma on Yeltsin’s orders in 1993.44 The key figures in his dream all emerge from the inundation of Russia by Western media. He imagines himself as a Mexican soap opera star, and Russia’s marriage to the West is allegorized in his loving submission to Arnold Schwarzenegger 43 As Clowes importantly notes, Pelevin’s novel is, among many things, a retort to ideologue Alexander Dugin’s neo-Eurasianist expressions of imperial nostalgia, of a renewed desire for geopolitical centrality, for power and security. 44 Simply Maria’s vision of a Russia embracing Western neoliberalism finds its origins in just that moment: Yeltsin ordered the strike on the Duma after its members impeached him, demanding a halt to his neoliberal shock therapy.

CHAPTER 3    Parody of Past and Present in Chapaev and the Void

in his role as the Terminator in the eponymous 1993 film. Pelevin highlights the feminine role Simply Maria assumes before the masculine West by noting the phallic nature of the Harrier jet Schwarzenegger places her on, a reference to another Schwarzenegger film, True Lies (1994). Simply Maria longs, in her feminine identity, for the paternalistic protection the Soviet state once offered, but Pelevin’s satire demonstrates that protection is a façade for exploitation. The dream narrative concentrates on Schwarzenegger’s eyes, the right one being robotic as in the conclusion to Terminator in which part of the machine’s skin is torn away to reveal its mechanical workings. Schwarzenegger’s left eye reminds readers of the American media’s positive presentation of the United States in the 1990s.45 The other eye reveals neoliberalism’s dark instrumentalization of humanity. Any union between Russia and the West cannot be an equal partnership, but one in which the West exploits Russia for its own ends. The second hospital patient, Semyon Serdyuk, envisions Russian unity with the East, but Pelevin discredits that, too, realizing it as farce. While Simply Maria looks to the West to replace Soviet paternalism, Serdyuk looks to the East for the possibility of achieving a noble death. For Serdyuk, the collapse of the Soviet Union deprived the country’s inhabitants of an ideology worth dying for, while in the East, to his Orientalizing Russian imagination, an honorable death might still be won. In the first moments of Serdyuk’s dream, Pelevin reveals that the character longs to sacrifice himself for a cause. Walking past his old school, the protagonist reminiscences about the Soviet world, full of possibilities he and his friends used to believe in, but that happy memory dissipates at the thought of the “zinc-plated coffins of experience.”46 Zinc coffins is a reference to the Afghan War, a war that in the 1980s was framed in the typically exalted Soviet military discourse as “our international duty.” But the brutality of that conflict destroyed any sense of honor among the Soviet combatants.47 Serdyuk’s friends, he imagines, joined the war dreaming of heroism 45 Pelevin writes of that positive presentation: it conveys “a mixture of passion for life, strength, a healthy love for children, moral support for the American automobile industry in its difficult struggle with the Japanese . . . and the calm assurance that democracy and JudeoChristian values would eventually conquer all evil in this world.” Pelevin, Buddha’s Little Finger, 56–57; idem, Chapaev i Pustota, 75. 46 Pelevin, Buddha’s Little Finger, 154; idem, Chapaev i Pustota, 187. 47 For more on the violence of the Afghan war and soldiers’ experience with it, see Jan Claas Behrends, “‘Some Call Us Heroes, Others Call Us Killers.’ Experiencing Violent Spaces: Soviet Soldiers in the Afghan War,” Nationalities Papers 43, no. 5 (2015): 719–734.

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and self-sacrifice, but Afghanistan exposed the Soviet Union’s military cult as false and meaningless. Like a wish-fulfillment, Serdyuk in his dream finds himself hired by a Japanese firm run according to a code of brotherhood and honor. But, just like Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan, he is asked to sacrifice his life for an entity that talks of honor but inspires no conviction. After the firm loses a contract to a competitor, Serdyuk is told that he must commit seppuku, ritual suicide. With this, Pelevin highlights the firm’s failure to produce a noble death by a credible ideology because, as the sword plunges into his stomach, Serdyuk feels the same sense of loss that the reality of the Afghan War gave to Soviet soldiers: “The sensation was quite unbearable, and Serdyuk began feverishly searching for the place where he had left behind the old familiar world.”48 A Russia joined with the East might superficially remind Russians of the simulacrum that inspired confidence in the Soviet Union’s cult of military valor, but it cannot resurrect that simulacrum from the dead. In the communal vision of Vladimir Volodin, Pelevin’s third dreamer, the gangster character longs for a Russian state that exercises absolute authority and an absolute monopoly on violence. This, the dream reveals, the postSoviet state cannot accomplish. Volodin belongs to those characterized by the term “New Russians”—gangsters, criminals, and thieves. This new Russian elite arose amidst the lawless capitalism of the 1990s, which advantaged men from defunct Soviet state institutions—the security services, army, and sports. They now were free to employ the violence they had been trained in for their own ends.49 This is the situation that Volodin and his interlocutors, the gangsters Shurik and Kolyan, exploit, but their discussions belie an anxiety over the lack of a central leader to regulate and direct their violent activities. In their first major discussion, the three reveal their fascination with the novelty of the decentralized violence across the Russian state. They discuss the elimination of moral limits as the murder of “their internal cops.” As they murder those internal cops, they are confronted by greater “internal authorities,” culminating with an impeachment showdown that features internal tanks and presidents.50 These are, of course, allusions to Russia’s 1993 constitutional crisis in which the Duma impeached Yeltsin after he attempted to dissolve it, and Yeltsin’s subsequent shelling of the parliament buildings. 48 Pelevin, Buddha’s Little Finger, 195; idem, Chapaev i Pustota, 237. 49 See Vadim Volkov, Violent Entrepreneurs: The Use of Force in the Making of Russian Capitalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002). 50 Pelevin, Buddha’s Little Finger, 252–253; idem, Chapaev i Pustota, 303–304.

CHAPTER 3    Parody of Past and Present in Chapaev and the Void

The three men’s obsession with the current lack of a paternalistic dictator emerges from their inability to exercise independence. Kolyan later compares the authority God holds over humanity in the post-Soviet world to Stalin’s in the Soviet world.51 He likens the two because he desires a figure who can exercise a universal authority over him and the country. Violence and authority in the new Russia have become self-sanctioned. Pelevin discredits Volodin and his friends’ neo-Stalinist thinking by demonstrating that their longing for Stalin’s authority makes them unable to cope with the chaotic present. Without the master discourse supplied by Stalin and the other Soviet leaders after him, Volodin is forced to rely on himself, but his need for a master makes self-reliance impossible. Pustota’s dreams also discredit another post-Soviet ideology and potential communal identity: neo-Eurasianism. Eurasianism represents the thought of a circle of Russian émigré intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s. Though they had fled the Soviet Union, they believed that the Bolshevik takeover of the country was part of Russia’s eventual destiny as a messianic Orthodox civilization. In their minds, the Mongol conquest of the Russian lands in the thirteenth century permitted a supranational symbiosis among ancient Slavs, Turks, and Mongols that isolated and protected Russian Orthodoxy from the spiritually deficient Catholic West.52 In the early 1990s Russia, this strain of thought was revived as Neo-Eurasianism, largely in the prolific writings of ideologue Alexander Dugin.53 Dugin made an ideal target for Pelevin not only because of his ubiquity in the 1990s, but also because he held that the Eurasian individual in the new Russian state must subordinate their will to the national collective, a view inimical to Pelevin’s solipsism.54 In her work on Pelevin, Clowes highlights his counter to Dugin’s version of Eurasianism.55 The writer’s choice to invoke the 51 Pelevin, Buddha’s Little Finger, 256–257; idem, Chapaev i Pustota, 309. 52 For Eurasianists, Russia’s later ascent to world prominence in the form of the Soviet Union demonstrated that the Russian civilization would soon save humanity from an individualist West and a barbarous East. Scholars of Eurasianism have variously dubbed their subject a variant of Russian nationalism, an imperial ideology which justifies Russia’s empire, a conservative movement that shared much with early twentieth-century German antimodernism, and an anticolonial approach to knowledge production. See the introductory article to Mark Bassin, Sergei Glebov, and Marlene Laruelle, eds., Between Europe and Asia: The Origins, Theories, and Legacies of Russian Eurasianism (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015). 53 Marlene Laruelle, Russian Eurasianism: An Ideology of Empire, trans. Mischa Gabowitsch (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2008), 107–108. 54 For an overview of Dugin’s thought, see Laruelle, Russian Eurasianism, 107–144. 55 Clowes, Russia on the Edge: Imagined Geographies and Post-Soviet Identities, 68–95.

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White general Baron Ungern von Sternberg, Clowes notes, is a parodic play on one of Dugin’s favorite historical tyrants. While Clowes examines how Pelevin transforms Dugin’s geospatial vision of the Russian empire into an imaginary space, Pelevin’s version of Inner Mongolia, an element of the parody that Clowes omits from her discussion is Pelevin’s poke at the pseudo-etymologies employed by Dugin and others that subscribe to Eurasianist thought. As Marlene Laruelle notes, these thinkers pay “special attention to etymology and similarities of sound,” as a way to uncover what they see as an ancient supranational unity among Slavs and nomadic Mongols and/or Turks.56 Pelevin discredits Dugin and other Eurasianists’ imperial ideology by showing that their etymologies do not divulge objective truths about the past, but rather reflect the individuality of their creators. This position is in line with Pelevin’s style. According to Andrei Stepanov in a 2003 article, Pelevin throughout his oeuvre employs puns in a Derridean manner to demonstrate that “the sign is indefinable, it can be defined only through another sign, and that through another sign, and that through another.”57 While the Eurasianists like Dugin look to etymologies to reveal truths about the immutable character of ethnic groups, Pelevin establishes, by way of esoteric interlinguistic puns, that meaning is always a product of context and individual experiences. In his 1919 existence, his Pustota examines the origins of the Russian word tachanka, 56 Laruelle, Russian Eurasianism: An Ideology of Empire, 175. Soviet Kazakh poet Olzhas Suleimenov offers an excellent example of this tendency. He elevated pseudo-etymology to an art form in his controversial 1975 work Az i ia. The book argues that the oldest known piece of literature in the Russian language, the late twelfth-century The Lay of Igor’s Campaign, was in fact authored by scribes bilingual in both old Russian and Turkic. The title is a pun. When taken together, Aziia is the Russian word for “Asia,” while, when taken apart, az is the old Russian word for “I” and ia is the modern Russian for “I.” The title then suggests that the individual consciousnesses, the “I”s of Slavic peoples of both past and present are linked to a broader Asian community. As with the title, creative pseudo-etymology does much of the work of the argument. For instance, Suleimenov maintains that the epithet “bui,” found in a vocative usage of several names in The Lay of Igor’s Campaign, does not mean “wild” (buinyi in Russian) as many later Russian scribes and commentators have read it, but rather a title of Turkic nobility, such as bii (Kazakh). Through such arguments, Suleimenov finds a union between Slavs and Turks in the deep past that, for him, suggests that their union under the USSR was predestined. See Olzhas Suleimenov, Az i ia. Kniga blagonamerennogo chitatelia (Almaty: Izdatel᾿skii dom “Biblioteka Olzhas,” 2011), 64–65. For more on the poetics of Az i ia, see Harsha Ram, “Imagining Eurasia: The Poetics and Ideology of Olzhas Suleimenov’s AZ i IA,” Slavic Review 60, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 289–311. 57 Andrei Stepanov, “Uroboros: plen uma Viktora Pelevina,” Russkii zhurnal, September 11, 2003, http://old.russ.ru/krug/20030911.html.

CHAPTER 3    Parody of Past and Present in Chapaev and the Void

the machine-gun carriage of the Civil War era. At first, he conjures Eurasianist images of Hunnish chariots that unite his Russian 1919 present with a multiethnic nomadic past: “The vehicles . . . had survived their jaunt into the future, and only then at the cost of transformation into parodies of Hunnish war chariots—such were the associations triggered by the sight of the three Lewis machine-guns tied together by a metal beam which had been installed in the rear section of the landau.”58 Pustota’s recognition of the vehicle not as an object revealing Eurasian origins but as a parody of that idea prepares his next move. He begins searching for the origins of the word tachanka, only to quickly abandon the search for the creation of a paranomasia: “Although I mentally reviewed all the possible etymologies as I pulled on my boots, I could not find one that really suited the case. 1 did, however, come up with a humorous play on words in English: tachanka—‘touch Anka’.”59 Unable to find the origin of the word, Pustota turns to English to create a punning joke that does not connect the deep past to present but only reflects his individuality. For all Eurasianist thinkers, English language and culture are consistently outside the Eurasian mythos.60 Pustota’s pun further emphasizes Pelevin’s rejection of Eurasianism for solipsism because, as the hero notes, the pun cannot serve any cause outside himself. He laments of it: “I felt unable to share my joke with anyone.”61 With this stress on solipsism, Pelevin’s parody of Eurasianism not only discredits the ideology but leads back to Pelevin’s overall message with the novel: his advocacy of an individual reality created by that individual. Through his four dreamers, Pelevin demonstrates how untenable are the ideologies of their dreams. While post-Soviet Russia is still a world of simulacra, much as the Soviet Union was, the state no longer holds a monopoly through Socialist Realism. Russian citizens are now free to imagine and advocate varied visions of communal identity. But for the solipsistic Pelevin, these identities are necessarily inadequate; they will never have the power over Russians that Socialist Realism did, nor should they.

58 Pelevin, Buddha’s Little Finger, 197. 59 Ibid., 198; Pelevin, Chapaev i Pustota, 240. 60 Pustota’s knowledge of English is rare for its time—a more common foreign language for Russians of his status during the Civil War would have been French or German. 61 Pelevin, Buddha’s Little Finger, 198; idem, Chapaev i Pustota, 240.

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Conclusion Chapaev and the Void remains Pelevin’s best work arguably because it sits at the crossroads of two eras and at a critical juncture of his own interests. By the time of Boris Yeltsin’s second term, the cult of sleepless Soviet heroes had become increasingly irrelevant. Such heroes are now part of Russia’s history, but with Russian literature and culture no longer circumscribed by Socialist Realism, they no longer play a leading role. With his parody of Chapaev and Socialist Realist insomnia, Pelevin issued a farewell of sorts to the myths on which he had constructed his oeuvre up to that point. Poking fun at the sleeplessness of Furmanov’s Bolshevik Klychkov, Pelevin delivers a Chapaev and Pyotr who no longer believe in objective reality and class consciousness. They find power not in awakening and joining the revolutionary masses, but in an individual’s ability to awaken themselves, to destroy the simulacra of others, and create their own. Pelevin’s concomitant satire of potential ideologies for the present Russian state foreshadows the road he would take beyond the novel. With nothing of the Soviet Union’s representational power left to parody, he turns his focus to the new media of post-Soviet Russian capitalism.

CHAPTER 4

Masking the Void, Voiding the Mask: Viktor Pelevin and the Performance of History ALEXANDER MCCONNELL, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN Life is irreversible— It will be staged in a new theatre, In a different way, with different actors But the ultimate happiness Is to fold its magic carpet And make the ornament of the present Match the pattern of the past . . . Vladimir Nabokov, “Paris Poem” (1943)1

V

iktor Pelevin’s novel Chapaev and the Void (Chapaev i Pustota, 1996) is a notoriously complex work defying generic classification.2 It has been described as a “pseudo-historical novel” in which allusions to both factual and mythologized elements of Russia’s Soviet past come thick and fast but are rarely

1 Quoted in Victor Pelevin, The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, trans. Andrew Bromfield (New York: Penguin Books, 2009), 49. See also Vladimir Nabokov, Selected Poems, trans. Dmitri Nabokov, ed. Thomas Karshan (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012), 111–116. 2 Viktor Pelevin, Chapaev i Pustota (Moscow: Vagrius, 1996). Unless indicated, I quote from the English translation: Victor Pelevin, Buddha’s Little Finger, trans. Andrew Bromfield (New York: Penguin Books, 2001), abbreviated henceforth as BLF. Also published in Great Britain as Victor Pelevin, The Clay Machine-Gun, trans. Andrew Bromfield (London: Faber & Faber, 1999).

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taken seriously.3 Indeed, as Sofya Khagi notes, many early reviewers mistook the novel for a misguided attempt at traditional historical fiction rather than “a work of alternative historical imagination informed by postmodern parody and play.”4 For his own part, Pelevin has spoken with disdain about history as an academic discipline, comparing it unfavorably to the hard sciences and stating bluntly: “Books on philosophy, sociology, and history rarely help anyone besides their own authors.”5 Such professed antipathy to the very idea of historiography, however, belies a more sophisticated and even playful attitude towards the historical contexts and characters in his writing. Pelevin’s historical sensibility can be best appreciated through the lens of performance, understood as both the ways in which people of the past—or in the telling phrase, “historical actors”—consciously perform their roles, and the means by which literary texts “perform” fictionalized renditions of history. In his seminal study of stage productions about the French Revolution and the Holocaust, theater scholar Freddie Rokem coined the term “hyperhistorian” to describe the function of actors in these performances: [T]he actors serve as a connecting link between the historical past and the “fictional” performed here and now of the theatrical event; they become a kind of historian, what I call a “hyper-historian,” who makes it possible for us—even in cases where the reenacted events are not fully acceptable for the academic historian as a “scientific” representation of the past—to recognize that the actor is “redoing” or “reappearing” as something/somebody that has actually existed in the past.6

Drawing on Rokem, I conceptualize Pelevin’s approach to the past as “hyper-history,” a designation connoting both the expansiveness of the author’s spatio-temporal purview and the performative character of his representations of historical phenomena. Crucially, however, while Rokem emphasizes 3 Angela Brintlinger, “The Hero in the Madhouse: The Post-Soviet Novel Confronts the Soviet Past,” Slavic Review 63, no. 1 (2004): 44. 4 Sofya Khagi, “Alternative Historical Imagination in Viktor Pelevin,” Slavic and East European Journal 62, no. 3 (2018): 486–487. 5 Viktor Pelevin, “Vdali ot kompleksnykh idei zhivesh᾿, kak Rembo,—day by day,” interview with Kommersant, September 2, 2003, https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/408159. 6 Freddie Rokem, Performing History: Theatrical Representations of the Past in Contemporary Theatre (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2000), 13. Emphasis in the original.

CHAPTER 4    Masking the Void, Voiding the Mask

“the restorative potentials of the theatre in trying to counteract the destructive forces of history,” for Pelevin, performance and theatricality serve more as channels for these destructive forces than antidote.7 Counteraction, it follows, is accomplished through the exposure of the theatrical act rather than its successful execution. Furthermore, where Rokem’s model gives pride of place to actors, the “hyper-historians” who enable theatergoers to connect past with present, Pelevin continually problematizes the distinction between actors and audience, suggesting an equivalence of roles (and responsibility) in transcending the false reality engendered by the performance of history. My use of “hyper-history” to describe Pelevin’s historical approach resonates with the postmodern notion of “hyperreality” articulated by Jean Baudrillard and others.8 Although definitions vary, hyperreality generally refers to a condition endemic to postmodernity “wherein distinctions between a representation and its original referent no longer exist.”9 In Baudrillard’s evocative formulation, “Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. . . . The desert of the real itself.”10 Russian cultural theorist Mikhail Epstein has linked Baudrillard’s concept of hyperreality with the official Soviet aesthetic of Socialist Realism, which similarly aspired to depict a real beyond the real—“reality in its revolutionary development.”11 Socialist Realism, he argues, engaged in “the creation of a hyperreality that is neither truthful nor false but consists of ideas that become reality for millions of people.”12 It can thus be understood as a precursor to the Russian postmodernism that emerged in the 1970s–80s and became hegemonic following the collapse of the USSR in 1991. “Today,” Epstein concluded in 1995, “we can address this phrase, ‘the desert of the real itself,’ directly to what remains of the Soviet   7 Ibid., 3.   8 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1994); Umberto Eco, Faith in Fakes: Travels in Hyperreality, trans. William Weaver (London: Vintage, 1995).   9 Catherine Chaput, “Hyperreality,” Encyclopedia of Postmodernism, ed. Victor E. Taylor and Charles E. Winquist (New York: Routledge, 2001), 183. 10 Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 1. Emphasis in the original. 11 A. A. Zhdanov, “Soviet Literature—the Richest in Ideas, the Most Advanced Literature” (1934), https://www.marxists.org/subject/art/lit_crit/sovietwriter congress/zdhanov.htm. 12 Mikhail Epstein, After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism in Contemporary Russian Culture (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), 206. Emphasis in the original.

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Union. This country is originally poor not in commodities, comfort, hard currency, but in reality itself.”13 The post-Soviet “desert of the real” constitutes the backdrop for many of Pelevin’s works, and scholars have frequently noted the Baudrillardian quality of his image-saturated, self-reflexive narratives.14 Mark Lipovetsky, for instance, writes that Generation ‘П’ (1999) “depicts the activities and rituals of post-Soviet copy-writers—creators and secular priests of the contemporary hyper-reality of simulacra.”15 Rebecca Stakun, meanwhile, contrasts the manufactured consumerist hyperrealities of Generation ‘П’ and Empire V (Ampir V. Povest o nastoiashchem sverkhcheloveke, 2006), in which the real is intentionally simulated, with the Buddhistic illusory realities of Chapaev and the Void and The Sacred Book of Werewolf (Sviashchennaia kniga oborotnia, 2004), in which there is simply nothing real in the first place.16 Thus, while the illusory nature of reality is an abiding theme in Pelevin’s work, the specific way in which this circumstance manifests and is handled by the characters varies from novel to novel. Subsumed within the overarching Buddhist dissolution of the real in Chapaev and the Void is a more discrete deconstruction of Russia’s “illusory” twentieth-century historical reality via the tropes of theatricality and performance. Ironically, given his contempt for the work of professional historians, Pelevin’s literary deconstructions of reality mirror the “performative turn” identified within historical studies over the past few decades.17 Of course, historians and other scholars have long employed parallels between the social world and the theatrical stage. Some, such as Hayden White, have even applied this dramaturgical model back onto historiography itself, arguing that those seeking 13 Ibid., 195. 14 Baudrillard even makes a cameo in Pelevin’s novella “The Macedonian Critique of French Thought.” See Sofya Khagi, “The Monstrous Aggregate of the Social: Towards Biopolitics in Victor Pelevin’s Work,” The Slavic and East European Journal 55, no. 3 (2011): 446–449; Mariia Fedianina, “‘Simvolicheskii obmen i smert᾿’ Zh. Bodriiiara kak pratekst ‘DPP (NN)’ V. Pelevina,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 132 (February 2015), https://www.nlobooks.ru/ magazines/novoe_literaturnoe_obozrenie/132_nlo_2_2015/article/11369/. 15 Mark Lipovetsky, “Post-Soviet Literature between Realism and Postmodernism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Russian Literature, ed. Evgeny Dobrenko and Marina Balina (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 189. 16 Rebecca Stakun, “Terror and Transcendence in the Void: Viktor Pelevin’s Philosophy of Emptiness” (PhD diss., University of Kansas, Lawrence, 2017), 112. 17 Peter Burke, “Performing History: The Importance of Occasions,” Rethinking History 9, no. 1 (2005): 35–52. See also the AHR forum “Historiographical ‘Turns’ in Critical Perspective,” American Historical Review 117, no. 3 (2012): 698–813.

CHAPTER 4    Masking the Void, Voiding the Mask

to explain the past consciously or unconsciously “emplot” their narratives into archetypal dramatic forms (Romance, Tragedy, Comedy, Satire).18 But as Peter Burke notes, the reception of postmodernism across the humanities has brought about a shift in how historians deploy this dramaturgical model, most notably a surge in popularity for the term “performance.” Identity categories such as ethnicity, gender, and class—as well as emotions, memory, knowledge, or even architecture—are increasingly seen as performances subject to improvisation, rather than fixed elements of social or culture reality. “Instead of drawing analogies between society and the theatre,” writes Burke, “the new approach dissolves the boundaries between them.”19 Pelevin’s approach to the past is also of a piece with the contemporary Russian vogue for what Jeffrey Brooks and Boris Dralyuk call “parahistory,” the popular appropriation of historical truth in service of fantastical reimaginings of bygone persons, places, or events. Parahistorical pursuits, such as online video games and military reenactments, “offer the chance to explore risk and agency collectively, in an environment relatively free of real-life consequences. The appeal is, essentially, ludic and carnivalesque.”20 The participatory nature of many such media invite users to act out their historical fantasies directly, instead of just watching or reading about them. In some cases, the line between reality and its parahistorical representation is blurred almost beyond recognition. Brooks and Dralyuk cite the example of Igor Girkin, alias Strelkov, a former Russian intelligence officer and avid historical reenactor who briefly rose to prominence as a paramilitary commander in the Donbass. According to the journalist Oleg Kashin, who profiled Girkin in 2014, “Strelkov . . . particularly loves the 1918–1920 battles of the Russian civil war, where he usually plays the role of a White Guard officer. Essentially, he is now playing the same role in Ukraine: his haircut, his mustache, his manners, and even his military tactics are almost all copied from images of White Guard officers in Soviet films.”21 Like a good Baudrillardian simulacrum, Girkin’s “performance” as Strelkov is a copy of a copy, an imitation of the stereotypical White Guard officers of Soviet 18 Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973). 19 Burke, “Performing History,” 41. 20 Jeffrey Brooks and Boris Dralyuk, “Parahistory: History at Play in Russia and Beyond,” Slavic Review 75, no. 1 (2016): 97. 21 Oleg Kashin, “The Most Dangerous Man in Ukraine Is an Obsessive War Reenactor Playing Now with Real Weapons,” trans. Ilya Lozovsky, New Republic, July 22, 2014, https://newrepublic.com/article/118813/igor-strelkov-russian-war-reenactor-fights-real-war-ukraine. Cited in Brooks and Dralyuk, “Parahistory,” 84.

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cinema rather than the actual historical figures themselves. Furthermore, in transplanting this performance from its original cinematic context to the war in Eastern Ukraine, going so far as to replicate fictionalized military tactics on real-life battlefields, Girkin ventures well beyond the bounds of conventional historical reenactment. While hardly typical, his case demonstrates the degree to which such appropriations of history can reshape not just popular understandings of the past, but present reality as well. As we shall see, the above description of Girkin/Strelkov is strikingly reminiscent of the Bolshevik commissars in Chapaev and the Void, whom Pelevin depicts as imposters par excellence. Before proceeding further with an examination of the novel, however, let us first consider two short stories that together bookend Russia’s twentieth century and illustrate Pelevin’s conception of performance as it relates to history.

Setting the Stage: “Crystal World” and “The Greek Version” In a 2003 interview with the news website Gazeta.ru, Pelevin gave the following answer when asked how Russian society had changed since the 1990s: I have a suspicion that on an essential level, nothing in Russia ever really changes. Rather, you are constantly being visited by one and the same petty demon, dressed up now as a commissar, now a salesman, now a bandit, now an FSB agent. This petty demon’s primary aim is to mess with your head, to make you believe a seismic shift is occurring, when really all that’s changing are his outfits. From this perspective, the history of Russia is simply the history of fashion.22

The choice of metaphor here is doubly significant. While maintaining his Buddhistic philosophy of human existence as a never-ending cycle, Pelevin reimagines Russia’s twentieth century as a series of costume changes in a continuous demonic performance. This performance consists in creating the illusion of transformation over time while, presumably, exploiting the resultant chaos for power and profit. As in Buddhism, transience of form (the demon’s costuming) is a corollary of the intrinsic and unchanging emptiness of being. “History” thus becomes a theatrical charade through which the static void of reality is creatively disguised. 22 Viktor Pelevin, “Istoriia Rossii—eto prosto istoriia mody,” interview, Gazeta.ru, September 2, 2003, https://www.gazeta.ru/2003/09/02/viktorpelevi.shtml. My translation.

CHAPTER 4    Masking the Void, Voiding the Mask

The reference to a “petty demon” (melkii bes) also evokes the 1907 novel of that title by Fyodor Sologub as well as an extensive demonological line in Russian literature, traceable from Gogol and Dostoevsky in the nineteenth century to Sologub, Andrei Bely, and Mikhail Bulgakov in the twentieth.23 Pelevin’s emphasis on demonic performativity and deception resonates in particular with Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita (writ. 1940, publ. 1967), which details the exploits of Woland (Satan) and his retinue of devils in Stalinist Moscow.24 Like Pelevin’s metaphorical “petty demon,” Woland and his retinue magically alter their appearances to deceive the hapless Muscovites they encounter. However, whereas Bulgakov’s conception of the demonic draws heavily on Biblical imagery and themes, Pelevin hews closer to what Pamela Davis describes as “an ingrained native [Russian] preference for the shabby, immanent, and pervasive devil over the grand Devil in his majesty.”25 His demons, like those of Dostoevsky’s novel, do not appear as such; rather, they manifest as projections of an inner darkness, becoming visible only in the eye (or mind’s eye) of the beholder.26 One of Pelevin’s earliest short stories, “Crystal World” (“Khrustal᾿nyi mir,” 1991), can be read as literalizing this interpretation of Russian history as the work of demons in disguise.27 The story, which prefigures several elements of the Civil War timeline in Chapaev and the Void, takes place in Petrograd on October 24, 1917, the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution. Two cadets named Yury and Nikolai stand guard along Shpalernaya Street, charged with preventing Vladimir Lenin from advancing towards the Bolshevik headquarters at the Smol᾿nyi Institute. “But what does this Lenin look like?” Yury asks. “Don’t know,” his captain replies. The two men pass the time snorting cocaine and philosophizing, and over the course of the night are approached by a succession 23 Adam Weiner, By Authors Possessed: The Demonic Novel in Russia (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998); Pamela Davis, ed., Russian Literature and Its Demons (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000). 24 For an exhaustive comparison of Chapaev and the Void with The Master and Margarita, see Ol᾿ga Bogdanova, Sergei Kibal᾿nik, and Liudmila Safronova, Literaturnye strategii V. Pelevina (St. Petersburg: St. Petersburg State University, 2007), 45–64. 25 Pamela Davis, “Russian Literature and Its Demons: Introductory Essay,” in Russian Literature and Its Demons, 3. 26 As Baron Yungern tells Pyotr in Chapaev and the Void, “If you discover that you are surrounded by impenetrable darkness, it only means that your own inner space is like the night. It’s a good thing you are agnostic, or there would be all manner of gods and devils roaming about in this darkness.” BLF, 235. 27 Victor Pelevin, “Crystal World,” in The Blue Lantern, trans. Andrew Bromfield (London: Faber, 2001), 65–90. First published in the journal Znanie—sila 3 (March 1991): 83–91.

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of curious figures: a well-dressed gentleman with a “semi-Chekhovian beard” and shifty eyes, a cautious older woman wearing a dark veil, a guitar-strumming invalid who claims to be a veteran of the Preobrazhensky Regiment, and a cheery mustachioed lemonade peddler. It soon becomes clear these are none other than Lenin himself, trying to sneak through in a variety of disguises. Like the historical Lenin, both the gentleman and old woman speak with a marked lisp, while the invalid pointedly refrains from speaking in order to avoid detection.28 The lemonade peddler has no speech impediment, but the bottles in his cart rattle “with a sound like lisping speech,” indicating more than just lemonade is stowed inside.29 Pelevin’s portrayal of revolutionary Petrograd is ominous and otherworldly. He characterizes Shpalernaya as “dark and mysterious,” simultaneously “dead” and “in a different sense, a non-human one . . . becoming more and more alive.”30 More than once, the path leading to Smol’nyi is likened to the “fissure leading to hell.”31 The two cadets, under the influence of this atmosphere as well as the cocaine, increasingly see their mission in correspondingly apocalyptic terms. Yury, we learn, has been told by a mysterious Swiss doctor that he will “play an immensely important role in history,” in part by “defending the world against an ancient demon.”32 Seemingly in line with this prediction, Lenin’s various incarnations exhibit satanic attributes, such as the pentagram-shaped sound hole of the invalid’s guitar.33 Despite these clues, Yury and Nikolai fail to recognize the Bolshevik leader, allowing the “typical class-conscious proletarian” lemonade peddler through and dooming the fragile crystal world of pre-Soviet Russia. The cadets’ fatal inaction, Pelevin implies, is compounded by their misapprehension of the demonic forces that truly drive history. On the lookout for an ancient, formless monster, they ignore the petty one hiding in plain sight.34 28 “Lenin spoke with a small speech impediment, a softened r that would normally have been fixed in childhood.” Oksana Bulgakowa, “Vocal Changes: Marlon Brando, Innokenty Smoktunovsky, and the Sound of the 1950s,” trans. Katerina Sark, in Sound, Speech, Music in Soviet and Post-Soviet Cinema, ed. Lilya Kaganovsky and Masaha Salazkin (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2014), 155. 29 Pelevin, “Crystal World,” 89. 30 Ibid., 72, 76. 31 Ibid., 72, 75, 80. 32 Ibid., 84. 33 Ibid., 82. 34 Empire V, Pelevin’s idiosyncratic take on vampire fiction, adopts the point of view of the demonic (vampiric) forces who mask the true nature of reality from humankind by

CHAPTER 4    Masking the Void, Voiding the Mask

In “The Greek Version” (“Grecheskii variant,” 1997), Pelevin presents an even more exaggeratedly theatricalized sketch of the post-Soviet business world.35 The main character, a successful Moscow banker named Vadik Kudryavtsev, is a former stage actor trained in the Stanislavsky method and obsessed with classical antiquity. This obsession fuels rumors “that his mind had snapped earlier—during his theater period,” and Kudryavtsev’s eccentric behavior lends credence to these speculations: Often he would try to transform his life into a fragment of a play along the lines of the ancient stories. When his subsidiary—the pension fund Russian Arcadia—declared bankruptcy, he didn’t slam the steel doors of his office on the mob of furious old folks as other bankers did. He reread Suetonius’s life of Caligula, then went out to face the crowd wearing a wreath of birch leaves and a short military tunic with a set of crossed silver lightning bolts in his left hand.36

As Kudryavstev's business ventures begin to sour, his historical fantasies become ever more grandiose. He soon rents out the Metropole Hotel and hires a classics scholar to stage a lavish wedding ceremony inspired by a ritual from The Iliad. The ex-actor grows agitated, however, when his choreographed Greco-Roman vision veers too close to a different historical referent: “But at first glance Kudryavtsev didn’t like her headdress. There was something deeply Soviet about it—the kind of costume women in folk ensembles wore performatively simulating historical change. As the novel’s protagonist Roma is instructed at various points, “Glamour and Discourse are the two main skills a vampire must master. The essence of them is disguise and control, and therefore power. . . . Changing clothes, disguise and concealment through masking are not merely technology, but the unique content of Glamour. And of Discourse as well. . . . The creation of the world includes the fabrication of a spurious, but at the same time absolutely authentic, panorama of the past. All those illimitable vistas into space and time are no more than stage settings in a theatre.” Victor Pelevin, Empire V: The Prince of Hamlet, trans. Anthony Phillips (London: Gollancz, 2016), 52, 63, 303. 35 Victor Pelevin, “The Greek Version,” trans. Byron Lindsey, Agni 50 (1999): 146–155. First published in Playboy (Russian edition) 5 (1997): 110–117. 36 Pelevin, “The Greek Version,” 148. Pelevin’s most recent novel as of this writing, Invincible Sun (Nepobedimoe solntse, 2020) similarly features an American historian named Frank who is studying the Roman emperor Caracalla (r. 198–217 CE). Frank’s research methodology is “necroempathy,” which requires imitating the appearance and characteristics of а deceased historical figure—in this case, the emperor’s hairstyle, beard, clothing, travel routes, and even manner of death. Viktor Pelevin, Nepobedimoe solntse (Moscow: Eksmo, 2020).

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when Caesar Brezhnev reigned.”37 The evening climaxes in a scene out of The Odyssey, with an unidentified archer slaying Kudryavtsev and the “suitors” he has assembled to participate in his pageant. Finally, in a surreal flourish, this archer is revealed to be Zeus himself, who takes the form of a white bull to rescue Kudryavtsev’s secretary and would-be bride Tanya from drowning in the Moscow River. “One of the main features that characterizes the notion of performing history,” Rokem states, “is the time lag between the now of the performance and the then of the historical events themselves.”38 In “The Greek Version” as in Chapaev and the Void, Pelevin effaces this time lag, blurring the line between the narrative’s theatricalized historical elements and its contemporary setting. The effect of this temporal effacement is a sort of performative recursion, in which Kudryavtsev’s attempts to stage an idealized version of classical antiquity end up mimicking post-Soviet reality, which in turn echoes the ancient world in its hedonistic splendor and casual brutality. The recreated Romanesque interior of the Metropole banquet hall, Pelevin writes, in fact most approximates “Moscow’s Novy Arbat at night, with all that street’s lights and billboards ablaze,” while the gangsters who attend the wedding “agreed so lightheartedly to become players in a drama still hazy to them because so much of the spectacle resembled everyday life in a strangely deceptive way.”39 That the principal source material for Kudryavstev’s performance is The Iliad—a Homeric epic about events of dubious historicity—only heightens the sense of having stepped out of historical time and into the realm of legend.40 The story’s deus ex machina conclusion, with a literal Greek god descending to resolve the plot, fully collapses any remaining boundaries between the mythical, the historical, and the theatrical, leaving the reader uncertain where “reality” begins or ends. “Crystal World” and “The Greek Version” thus represent partial distillations of Pelevin’s historical sensibility, the early Soviet and post-Soviet halves of a hyper-history of Russia’s twentieth century that receives full expression only in Chapaev and the Void. In “Crystal World,” Pelevin foreshadows the performative critique he will level against Bolshevism throughout the novel and gives concrete form to his conception of Russian history as a demonic masquerade. His Lenin turns out to be a particularly pernicious incarnation of the “Soviet 37 Pelevin, “The Greek Version,” 152. 38 Rokem, Performing History, 6. Emphasis in the original. 39 Pelevin, “The Greek Version,” 151. 40 See Kurt A. Raaflab, “Historicity of Homer,” in The Homer Encyclopedia, ed. Margalit Finkelberg (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2011), 359–361.

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trickster” archetype, lacking stable form or features but “able to reproduce any identity as an artistically imitated role.”41 In “The Greek Version,” meanwhile, Pelevin enacts a smaller-scale variation on the intertwining of past and present employed in Chapaev and the Void. Although Vadik Kudryavtsev does not actually travel across space-time in the manner of Pyotr Pustota, his Greco-Roman theatrics nevertheless produce a similar effect, the restaging of post-Soviet reality as a fantastical psychodrama rooted in suppressed historical trauma.42

(Hyper) Historical Contexts: 1917 and 1991 In contrast to the theory of hyperreality—a reality more real than real— Rokem’s conception of stage actors as “hyper-historians” maintains a strict division between theatrical instantiations of the past and the past itself. The ability to embody characteristics inherent to historical events or contexts, he cautions, “does not imply that the actors performing history are transformed into historical figures or believe that they are such figures, because that would make it necessary to transfer them to the mental ward where the ‘Napoleons’ are supposedly kept.”43 Tellingly, this is precisely the move Pelevin executes in Chapaev and the Void. His hyper-historian, the novel’s protagonist Pyotr Pustota, is a schizophrenic confined to a mental hospital in early 1990s Moscow. Alongside his fellow patients, Pyotr (whose last name literally means “emptiness” or “void”) undergoes hypnotherapy sessions led by a doctor writing his dissertation on the split false personality.44 The narrative alternates between the ostensible reality of the post-Soviet hospital and the hallucinatory states triggered by these therapy sessions, which in Pyotr’s case take the form of

41 Mark Lipovetsky, Charms of the Cynical Reason: The Trickster’s Transformations in Soviet and Post-Soviet Culture (Boston, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2011), 267. On Lenin’s trickster-like qualities, see ibid., 40–42; Levon Abrahamian, “Lenin as a Trickster,” Anthropology & Archeology of Eurasia 38, no. 2 (1999): 8–26. 42 “Whatever the case, it was obvious that [Kudryavtsev’s] past contained some kind of secret, some suppressed horror connected with the ancient world.” Pelevin, “The Greek Version,” 147. For an approach to the historical content of Chapaev and the Void drawing on the methodology of trauma studies, see Boris Noordenbos, “Shocking Histories and Missing Memories: Trauma in Viktor Pelevin’s Čapaev i Pustota,” Russian Literature 85, no. 1 (2016): 43–68. 43 Rokem, Performing History, 12-13. 44 BLF, 88.

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historical fantasies set during the Russian Civil War and involving the famous Red Army commander Vasily Chapaev (1887–1919).45 Scholarly analyses of Chapaev and the Void invariably coalesce around the myriad parallels between the novel’s twinned historical realities, both liminal settings characterized by state collapse, social upheaval, and mass identity re-formation. “The two ‘lives’ of Pyotr Pustota,” writes Elana Gomel, “are located at the two crucial points in Russia’s recent history: the Revolution and its failure.”46 Stakun describes the various spatial-temporal planes of Chapaev and the Void as a “closed loop” in which events recur ad infinitum, with the novel’s “paradoxical and cyclical” structure reflecting the “transitional and disorienting” nature of both the immediate post-1917 and post-Soviet periods. She cites Pyotr’s nearly identical descriptions of Tverskoi Boulevard in the novel’s first and last chapters, noting that even the chapter numbers (01 and 10) bring to mind an endless cycle.47 Analyzing these same passages, Edith Clowes remarks, “Moscow of the 1990s breathes an emptiness suggesting loss. . . . Pyotr rejects this contemporary Moscow, continually recreating the 1919 Moscow of his dreams.”48 “By collapsing 1919 into the 1990s,” concludes Angela Brintlinger, “Pelevin links the beginnings of both of these new eras with a profound sense of emptiness.”49 As the above suggests, the dual historical contexts of Chapaev and the Void have been discussed most often in terms of a shared identity crisis manifesting on an individual level through Pyotr’s bifurcated personality. By the end of the novel, writes Clowes, Pelevin demonstrates that “the collective Russian psyche, insofar as it exists, is in a state of crisis, full of the debris of Soviet ideology.”50 Stakun’s account of Pyotr’s speech to the weavers’ regiment in chapter Three is even more characteristic in this regard: 45 On the Chapaev mythos in Soviet culture, see Angela Brintlinger, Chapaev and His Comrades: War and the Russian Literary Hero across the Twentieth Century (Boston, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2012); Justus Grant Hartzok, “Children of Chapaev: The Russian Civil War Cult and the Creation of Soviet Identity, 1918–1941” (PhD diss., University of Iowa, Iowa City, 2009); Jason Read Morton, “The Creation of a ‘People’s Hero’: Vasilii Ivanovich Chapaev and the Fate of Soviet Popular History” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2017). 46 Elana Gomel, “Viktor Pelevin and Literary Postmodernism in Post-Soviet Russia,” Narrative 21, no. 3 (2013): 318. 47 Stakun, “Terror and Transcendence,” 132–135. 48 Edith Clowes, Russia on the Edge: Imagined Geographies and Post-Soviet Identity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 73. 49 Brintlinger, Chapaev and His Comrades, 239. 50 Clowes, Russia on the Edge, 93.

CHAPTER 4    Masking the Void, Voiding the Mask This episode, significantly, takes place not in the post-Soviet period where Pyotr (and an entire post-Soviet generation) is experiencing an identity crisis, but rather in the Civil War period where everyone was also experiencing an identity crisis, as the old, imperial regime collapsed and the new Bolshevik regime imposed a new political system, a new economy, a new “Soviet” identity.51

The collapses of the Russian Empire in 1917 and the USSR in 1991 did indeed precipitate something like collective identity crises. In the case of 1917, this process was further complicated by the revolutionary class and nationalities politics of the Bolsheviks, who sought to build an egalitarian socialist society on the detritus of the multinational, patriarchal, estate-stratified empire.52 Far from simply imposing its will on the population, however, the nascent regime got caught up in the same chaotic dynamics of identity reformation as the rest of Russia. In the words of Leopold Haimson, the years between the outbreak of civil war in 1918 and the adoption of the New Economic Policy in 1921 witnessed “the periodic loosening and retightening of social bonds but also repeated redefinition—both willed and unwilled, from above, but also from

51 Stakun, “Terror and Transcendence,” 133. For further examples of this interpretive tendency, see Krystyna A. Steiger, “Satire, Parody, and Nostalgia on the Threshold: Viktor Pelevin’s Chapaev i Pustota in the Context of its Times” (PhD diss., McGill University, Montreal, 2004), 16–18, 32–33, and passim; Rajendra Anand Chitnis, Literature in Post-Communist Russia and Eastern Europe: The Russian, Czech and Slovak Fiction of the Changes 1988–98 (New York: Routledge, 2005), 155. 52 See, among others, Diane P. Koenker, William G. Rosenberg, and Ronald G. Suny, eds., Party, State, and Society in the Russian Civil War: Explorations in Social History (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989); Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Ascribing Class: The Construction of Social Identity in Soviet Russia,” Journal of Modern History 65, no. 4 (1993): 745–770; Lewis Siegelbaum and Ronald G. Suny, Making Workers Soviet: Power, Class, and Identity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994); Yuri Slezkine, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,” Slavic Review 53, no. 2 (1994): 414–452; Elizabeth Wood, The Baba and the Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997); Ronald G. Suny and Terry Martin, eds., A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Terry Martin, Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005).

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below—of the identities of various groups in national life, as well as of their relationships to one another and to the body politic as a whole.”53 The dissolution of the USSR on December 26, 1991 similarly invalidated longstanding categories of personal and public belonging, rendering “Soviet identity” irrelevant overnight while offering no clear replacement.54 The resultant identity crisis was especially acute in the Russian Federation. As the de facto successor state to the Soviet Union and inheritor of its international rights and obligations, Russia faced the task of reconciling any renewal of nationalism with culpability for the failure of communism.55 Thus, explains Michael Urban, while most post-communist countries could position a positive discourse of national identity against the negative, “foreign” legacy of Soviet domination, in Russia, “a discourse of identity forfeits from the outset the possibility of constructing some other nation onto which might be loaded the negative moment in the recreation of a national community.” Consequently, what might have been an opportunity for unity turned instead into a catalyst for polarization and recrimination, as the “content of quotidian politics” increasingly became “entangled with the intractable issue of identity.”56 However, if the revolutionary events of 1917 and 1991 unquestionably triggered collective identity crises—that is, crises of self-understanding, resulting from the loss of a stable external referent for the identities in question— they also triggered crises of self-presentation, a related but distinct phenomenon from one’s understanding of oneself. As Sheila Fitzpatrick argues,

53 Leopold H. Haimson, “The Problem of Social Identities in Early Twentieth-Century Russia,” Slavic Review 47, no. 1 (1988): 1. 54 Anna Whittington, “Forging Soviet Citizens: Ideology, Identity, and Stability in the Soviet Union, 1930–1991,” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2018). For overviews of the Soviet collapse, see Stephen Kotkin, Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970–2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Jeremy Smith, The Fall of Soviet Communism, 1985–1991 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). On the experiences of the “last Soviet generation,” see Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); Donald J. Raleigh, Soviet Baby Boomers: An Oral History of Russia’s Cold War Generation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 55 On the role of nationalism in the Soviet collapse, see Ronald G. Suny, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993); Mark R. Beissinger, Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 56 Michael Urban, “The Politics of Identity in Russia’s Postcommunist Transition: The Nation against Itself,” Slavic Review 53, no. 3 (1994): 733–734. Emphasis in the original.

CHAPTER 4    Masking the Void, Voiding the Mask Successful revolutions tear off masks: that is, they invalidate the conventions of self-presentation and social interaction that obtained in pre-revolutionary society. This happened in Russia after the October 1917 revolution which laid the foundations for the Soviet state. It happened again in 1991, when that state collapsed. In such upheavals, people have to reinvent themselves, to create or find within themselves personae that fit the new post-revolutionary society.57

In addition to identity crisis, therefore, we might speak of performative crisis, a sudden and transformative reconfiguration of accepted social roles and cultural tropes that destabilizes the public performance of identity, or what Erving Goffman famously termed “the presentation of self in everyday life.” Per Goffman, when we equate “the character one performs and one’s self,” imagining a preexisting self that produces its own public representation, we mistake the effect of a successful performance for its cause: “The self, then, as a performed character, is not an organic thing that has a specific location . . . ; it is a dramatic effect arising diffusely from a scene that is presented, and the characteristic issue, the crucial concern, is whether it will be credited or discredited.”58 According to Goffman’s dramaturgical account of social interaction, any performance of self involves some degree of “misrepresentation.” There is nevertheless a difference between “outright impersonations and barefaced lies” (for example, claiming to have been born somewhere one was not) and more ambiguous forms of deception, which might be recognized as such only within particular cultural, historical, or other contexts.59 What is regarded today as a false front may tomorrow become a credible self-presentation, and vice versa; “the social definition of impersonation,” it turns out, “is not itself a very consis-

57 Sheila Fitzpatrick, Tear Off the Masks!: Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 3. Fitzpatrick acknowledges a theoretical difference between self-identification (“a labelling process that may carry only an instrumental purpose”) and self-understanding (“implying belief that the self is as one understands it”), but her definition elides the two under the assumption that “the self-understanding of subjects is accessible to historians only through practices like self-identification” (ibid., 9) For the purposes of this discussion, therefore, I use self-presentation to mean those practices by which an individual conveys, or attempts to convey, a particular image of the self to others. 58 Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday, 1959), 252–253. 59 Ibid., 58–66.

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tent thing.”60 During moments of performative crisis, this everyday dynamic of crediting/discrediting comes under extraordinary strain as the criteria for what constitutes a legitimate self-presentation rapidly shift, often in unpredictable ways. Even those whose sense of self remains relatively stable can find themselves straining to perform an unfamiliar set of roles. Understanding 1917 and 1991 as performative crises helps to contextualize Pelevin’s representation of Russia’s twentieth-century historical reality in Chapaev and the Void. In particular, the novel’s critique of Bolshevik performativity relies on the actual history of the Civil War period, which saw a renaissance of amateur theater, agitational plays, and political mock trials.61 The mythology of the revolution itself became the subject of public performances and mass reenactments that the Bolshevik regime relied on “to convey to the population the aesthetic and dramatic essence of October.”62 Beyond the confines of traditional theaters, practices of dramatic self-presentation proliferated as part of a “widespread movement during the early years of the revolution to theatricalize almost every aspect of the new life.”63 As one contemporary remarked, “Future historians will note that during a time of the most bloody and cruel revolution, all of Russia was acting.”64 But enthusiasm for all things theatrical was accompanied by a pervasive performance anxiety, which grew over time into hysteria over suspected “saboteurs,” “foreign spies,” “double-dealers,” and other enemies who needed to be “unmasked.” Already by the 1920s, notes Fitzpatrick, “the theatrical metaphor of masks was ubiquitous” in official Soviet discourse, climaxing in the carefully stage-managed Stalinist show trials of the 1930s.65 60 Ibid., 59. 61 Lynn Mally, Revolutionary Acts: Amateur Theater and the Soviet State, 1917–1938 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 17–46. See also Elizabeth Wood, Performing Justice: Agitational Trials in Early Soviet Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005). 62 Frederick C. Corney, Telling October: Memory and the Making of the Bolshevik Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 2. 63 Richard Stites, “Trial as Theatre in the Russian Revolution,” Theatre Research International 23, no. 1 (1998): 7–13. 64 Cited in Mally, Revolutionary Acts, 17. 65 Fitzpatrick, Tear Off the Masks!, 13. See also William Chase, “Stalin as Producer: The Moscow Show Trials and the Construction of Mortal Threats,” in Stalin: A New History, ed. Sarah Davies and James Harris (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 226– 248; Katerina Clark, “Face and Mask: Theatricality and Identity in the Era of the Show Trials (1936–1938),” in her Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931–1941 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 210–241. For a remarkable case study of the ways in which official rhetoric enabled a certain type of imposture, see Golfo Alexopolous, “Portrait of a Con Artist as a Soviet Man,” Slavic Review 57, no. 4 (1998): 774–790.

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Viktor Deni, “The Entente Behind the Mask of Peace” (Moscow, 1920).

In Chapaev and the Void, Pelevin redirects the Soviet mania for unmasking enemies back towards its source, caricaturing Bolshevism as the epitome of inauthenticity and laying bare the imposture it demands of its adherents. As in “Crystal World,” the implied model for this imposture is infernal rather than historical; Bolshevik self-presentation, in Pelevin’s view, represents a

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pernicious, pseudo-revolutionary restyling of the demonic power that has long operated in Russia. Performative crises such as 1917 provide the ideal conditions for this power to swap disguises and entice a new cohort of would-be thespians. Indeed, it is partly an appreciation for costuming that makes the demon’s entreaties so irresistible: Many decadents, such as Mayakovsky, sensing the clearly infernal character of the new authority, had hastened to offer their services to it. As a matter of fact, it is my belief that they were not motivated by conscious satanism—they were too infantile for that—but by aesthetic instinct: after all, a red pentagram does complement a yellow blouse so marvelously well.”66

For Pelevin, therefore, a Buddhistic philosophy of historical recurrence does not necessarily preclude shifts in how history functions at the level of performance: one and the same “petty demon” may assume numerous guises to mask the underlying void of reality.67 If in Fitzpatrick’s formulation, “successful revolutions tear off masks,” then in Pelevin’s, successful masks simulate revolutions.

“Life is a Theater” A concern with costuming is evident from the outset of Chapaev and the Void. The novel opens with Pyotr Pustota wandering the streets of Moscow and observing changes to the city since the October Revolution. Unlike Bulgakov’s Woland, who mounts a performance to test whether the new Soviet people of the capital have changed inwardly, Pyotr’s impressions concern the outward appearance of those he encounters. Even the bronze Pushkin monument on Tverskoi Boulevard is noted primarily for its “red apron bearing the

66 BLF, 4. 67 Although Chapaev and the Void deals solely with Russia’s past, Pelevin has elsewhere indicated that the performance of history is a fundamental human quality rather than a national peculiarity. In the words of A Hu-Li, the ageless werefox narrator of The Sacred Book of the Werewolf: “We watch the endless performance played out by bustling human actors who behave as if they were the first people ever to perform on the stage. They all die off with incredible speed, and their place is taken by the new intake, who begin playing out the same old parts with the same old pomposity. Of course, the scenery keeps changing, sometimes far too much. But the play itself hasn’t changed for a long, long time.” Pelevin, The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, 49–50.

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inscription: ‘Long Live the First Anniversary of the Revolution’.”68 This sartorial focus extends to Pyotr’s own quasi-reactionary getup, a tsarist military cap and officer’s boots, which he describes as in “outrageously bad taste” before recounting a futile attempt to fit in with the crowd: “The previous day, in the water-closet at the railway station, I had tried sticking a red bow on my chest, but I removed it as soon as I caught sight of my reflection in the cracked mirror; with the ribbon I looked not merely stupid, I looked doubly suspicious.”69 Far from masking a lack of revolutionary credentials, this feeble gesture only heightens Pyotr’s anachronistic and hence dubious appearance, while the cracked glass and the word “doubly” (vdvoine) portend a further fracturing of his already duplicated mirror image. It is no surprise, therefore, when Pyotr stumbles upon something of a doppelgänger in a childhood acquaintance and fellow poet, Grigory von Ernen (“Grigory Vorblei” in the English translation). Grigory has begun working for the Cheka, the secret police arm of the Bolsheviks, a situation he explains in terms of theatrical production: “‘Listen,’ he said, ‘life is a theatre. That’s a wellknown fact. But what you don’t hear said so often is that every day the theatre shows a new play. And right now, Petya, I’m putting on a show the likes of which you can’t imagine . . .’”70 Grigory’s claims impute both a performative and iterative quality to his activity, again highlighting the tension between temporal stasis and its dramatic representation. Much like Pelevin’s imagined “petty demon” of Russian history, Grigory is constantly “putting on a show,” the precise contents of which change from day to day. “Life is a theatre” also echoes the famous opening lines of Jacques’s monologue from Shakespeare’s As You Like It (act 2, scene 7): All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts . . .

Grigory’s newfound identity as a secret police agent, Pelevin intimates, is merely the latest in a series of roles he will perform during his life. This intimation is

68 BLF, 1. 69 Ibid., 2. 70 Ibid., 6.

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further reinforced by Pyotr’s discovery that his old friend is operating under the comical pseudonym Fanernyi or “plywood,” a word also meaning “false.”71 Pyotr himself assumes this false identity after strangling Grigory in a struggle, seizing his Cheka pass, and putting on his leather jacket. In doing so, he becomes a copy of a copy, a simulacrum Bolshevik with the forged papers to prove it. Examining his mirror image anew, Pyotr is struck by what he finds: “The leather jacket was just my size—the dead man and I were almost exactly the same height. When I tightened the belt with the holster dangling from it and looked at my reflection, what I saw was the very image of a Bolshevik.”72 In stark contrast to his reflection in the train station bathroom, Pyotr now sees a properly outfitted and thoroughly convincing soldier of the revolution. His transformation, Pelevin implies, entails more than adopting the trappings of Bolshevism; pinning a red bow on one’s chest may satisfy the decadent’s “aesthetic instinct,” but а credible performance requires actively living the part, akin to what Stanislavsky termed the “art of experiencing” (iskusstvo perezhivaniia).73 Only after committing an act of deadly violence, therefore, does Pyotr begin to embody the fiendish role in which he now finds himself cast. Before being killed, Grigory concludes his theatrical musings by presenting Pyotr with a dilemma: “And it’s not even the play that’s the thing,” he said. “To continue the analogy, in the old days anyone who felt like it could fling a rotten egg at the stage. Today, however, it’s the actors who are more likely to rake the hall with machine-gun fire—they might even toss out a bomb. Think about it, who would you rather be right now? An actor or a member of the audience?”74

Grigory’s schema posits a division between actors and audience not present in Jacques’ monologue: life may be a theater, but not all men and women are 71 Bromfield renders this as “Fourply” in the English translation, preserving the humor but not the double meaning. 72 BLF, 12. 73 Constantin Stanislavski, An Actor Prepares, trans. Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood (New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1956), 12–32. 74 BLF, 6. Bromfield’s translation seems to invoke Shakespeare’s Hamlet (“The play’s the thing/ Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king . . .”), which would be apropos given the following scene at the “Musical Snuffbox.” However, no Russian translation of Hamlet that I have consulted has a wording close to that of Pelevin’s original (“Delo dazhe ne v samoi p'ese . . .”).

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players. Under the new order, Grigory asserts, to be on stage is to occupy a position of dominance. His questions to Pyotr also convey the possibility, indeed necessity, of choice; one must decide whether to be an actor or remain an audience member, with potentially lethal consequences. This actor-audience hierarchy can be read as a reflection of historical Bolshevism’s theory of vanguardism, in which a cadre of professional revolutionaries (the “actors”) work to spread Marxist ideas amongst the unconscious masses (the “audience”).75 The end goal, however, is not to perpetuate this hierarchy but to convince—or if necessary, compel—the entire audience to join the performance. Pelevin puts Grigory’s propositions to the test in the following scene at the “Musical Snuffbox,” a literary cabaret where Pyotr views an avant-garde adaption of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (Prestuplenie i nakazanie, 1866). Scanning the crowd, he notices “a strange man sporting a military blouse” whom he takes for a “big Bolshevik boss.” Unbeknownst to Pyotr, this is none other than Vasily Chapaev. The play, reentitled Raskolnikov and Marmeladov, opens with both characters in flowing white robes and Greek masks. At one point during the meandering performance, Marmeladov dramatically removes his own mask to reveal the old moneylender whom Raskolnikov murders in Dostoevsky’s novel. This time, it is the moneylender who strangles Raskolnikov in a manner resembling what Pyotr has just done to Grigory. Pyotr becomes agitated as a result, suspecting the other audience members of conspiring against him. His attention immediately turns to Chapaev: “My eyes once again met those of the man in the black military blouse, and I somehow suddenly realized that he knew all about the death of Vorblei—that he knew, in fact, far more serious things about me than just that.”76 Like the play-within-a-play from Hamlet, Raskolnikov and Marmeladov seems designed to “catch the conscience” of Pyotr and expose his crime. This Shakespearian undercurrent is strengthened by the four cloaked figures who remove Raskolnikov’s body, recalling “the very end of Hamlet, where there is a mention of four captains who are supposed to carry away the dead prince.”77 But instead of fleeing the theater like King Claudius, Pyotr takes up Grigory’s challenge to cross the proscenium and join the performance. Any lingering 75 Russian revolutionaries, Lenin argued, must adopt more conspiratorial tactics than those in countries where “the entire political arena is as open to the public view as is a theatre stage to the audience.” V. I. Lenin, What is to Be Done?, trans. S. V. and Patricia Utechin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), 159. 76 BLF, 20–21. 77 Ibid., 21.

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fears of exposure are allayed by reassuring himself that “today I too was granted the honour of stepping over my own old woman, but you will not choke me with her imaginary fingers.”78 As Pyotr is about to read a poem scrawled on the back of a Cheka arrest form, however, he gazes out at the crowd and experiences a disturbing vision: “All the faces I saw seemed to merge into a single face, at once fawning and impudent, frozen in a grimace of smug servility—beyond the slightest doubt this was the face of the old moneylender, the old woman, disincarnate, but still alive as ever.”79 His attempt to perform his way out of danger thus backfires, merely displacing the accusatory gaze from the stage to the seats. The unexpected reappearance of Dostoevsky’s old moneylender caps off a dizzying sequence of theatrical deception and revelation, one in which the actor-audience hierarchy posited by Grigory is repeatedly subverted. Although Pyotr ostensibly enters the “Musical Snuffbox” as a member of the audience, he is in fact acting the entire time under a stolen false identity. And whilst unnerved by the resemblance of Raskolnikov and Marmeladov to his own criminal activity, it is a fellow audience member, Chapaev, whom Pyotr correctly suspects may be working behind the scenes to direct the play’s action. The presence of “Theatre Commissar Madam Malinovskaya” amongst the spectators likewise hints at a more complicated distribution of performative authority.80 Moreover, by having Pyotr figuratively “unmask” the cabaret crowd to reveal the same face hidden beneath Marmeladov’s disguise—that of the moneylender—Pelevin demonstrates the precariousness of the actor’s position vis-à-vis the audience. Though no longer embodied in the person of Grigory, Pyotr’s “own old woman” remains “alive as ever,” a symbolic witness to his Bolshevik original sin and continued historical posturing. The old moneylender appears before Pyotr a second time at the very end of the novel, after he has been discharged from the mental hospital. Wandering the all-too-familiar streets of post-Soviet Moscow, he mutters Marmeladov’s question to Raskolnikov from Crime and Punishment: “And have you any idea, 78 Ibid., 22. 79 Ibid., 24–25. This specific image may owe its provenance to a 1923 silent film adaption of Crime and Punishment by the German Expressionist director Robert Wiene (best known for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari): “While [Raskolnikov] strikes her with the ax several times, she continues her wild laughter and with every blow new heads appear. Finally, a gigantic head of the old woman appears and fills the screen.” Uli Jung and Walter Schatzberg, Beyond Caligari: The Films of Robert Wiene (New York: Berghahn Books, 1999), 102. 80 Elena Konstantinovna Malinovskaya (1875–1942) served as Moscow theater commissar in 1917 and director of the Bolshoi Theater in 1920–1924 and 1930–1935.

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my dear sir, what it is like when you have nowhere left to go?”81 These words naturally bring to mind the “Marmeladov-woman from the ‘Musical Snuffbox’,” and Pyotr decides to seek out the literary cabaret, the one place that might offer a way out of his temporal loop.82 If “life is a theatre” and history its neverending production, the best hope of escape is to somehow stop the show. “In my situation,” as Pyotr muses in a moment of foreshadowing, “to die was every bit as natural and reasonable as to leave a theatre that has caught fire in the middle of a lackluster performance.”83 He finds the cabaret largely unchanged, save for a new name—“John Bull International.” Taking the stage, Pyotr again visualizes every face in the audience merging into one, “the face of that old moneylender, the old woman, disincarnate but as alive as ever.”84 After reading a self-referential poem titled “Eternal Non-Return,” he shoots down the chandelier and, in the ensuing exchange of gunfire, exits to join Chapaev and depart for the utopia of “Inner Mongolia,” thereby enacting the metaphorical death he imagined earlier. Pyotr’s initial decision to take the cabaret stage thus sets in motion the events that lead to his departure from the “theater” of human existence—not as a fleeing spectator, but as an actor who has broken character for good. The parallel scenes at the “Musical Snuffbox” and “John Bull International” reiterate the essential continuity of the novel’s post-revolutionary and post-Soviet timelines, with theatrical space serving as a sort of gateway between past, present, and the eternal, a stage across time for the performance of history. Before bringing down the curtain on this “lackluster performance,” Pelevin suggests, Pyotr must first become part of it. After all, who better than an actor to tear off a mask?

Devils in Disguise Although Pyotr encounters Chapaev without realizing it at the “Musical Snuffbox,” their first formal meeting comes the next day amidst a different kind of performance, with Pyotr awakening to find Chapaev playing a Mozart fugue on the piano. Later, reflecting on the apparent incongruity between Chapaev’s

81 BLF, 324. See Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage, 1992), 17, 45. 82 BLF, 324. 83 Ibid., 29. 84 Ibid., 332.

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cultured manner and stern military appearance, Pyotr questions the veracity of this self-presentation: I still found it hard to believe that [Chapaev] really was a Red commander; somehow I felt that he was playing the same insane game as myself, only he had been playing longer, with greater skill and perhaps of his own volition. . . . And then, I thought, the very question itself was stupid—there was not a single Red commander who was really a Red commander; every one of them simply tried as hard as he could to emulate some infernal model, pretending in just the same way as I had done the previous day.85

Here again, Pelevin explicitly points to the “infernal” character lurking beneath the outward performance of Bolshevism. In fact, this connection is introduced on the novel’s very first page, with the Pushkin statue’s festive apron prompting Pyotr to comment on the “demonic face concealed behind such lapidary absurdities inscribed on red.”86 Whereas the Lenin of “Crystal World” conceals his revolutionary intentions beneath a series of ordinary-seeming disguises, in the post-1917 historical plane of Chapaev and the Void, Bolshevism itself has become the mask of choice. Pyotr subsequently shares these thoughts with Chapaev, telling him, “This all reminds me very much of a masquerade.”87 Chapaev, however, is no run-of-the-mill Red commander. His masterful performance of Bolshevism rests mainly not on studied emulation, but on a preternatural ability to channel the desires of his audience. When addressing the masses, Chapaev explains, “it is quite unimportant whether one understands the words that one speaks. What is important is that other people understand them. One has simply to reflect the expectations of the crowd.”88 This 85 Ibid., 70. The protagonist of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago (1957) expresses similar thoughts upon meeting the Red Army commander Pasha Antipov, alias Strelnikov: “This man must have possessed some gift, not necessarily an original one. The gift that showed in all his movements might be the gift of imitation. They all imitated someone then. The glorious heroes of history. Figures seen at the front or in the days of disturbances in the cities and who struck the imagination. The most acknowledged authorities among the people. Comrades who came to the fore. Or simply each other.” Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage, 2011), 221. 86 BLF, 1. Consider also the pentagram-shaped “Order of the October Star” worn by Chapaev and others, a parody of Soviet military decorations (ibid., 67, 171, 200–201, 216). 87 Ibid., 81. 88 Ibid., 76.

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technique, Pyotr soon realizes, requires no conscious effort whatsoever. Not only is Chapaev oblivious to the meaning of what he says, he does not even bother with an elementary awareness of the words themselves, relying instead on an extrasensory connection with his listeners: “Perhaps, having fallen into some kind of trance, he could sense the vibrations of anticipation projected by the crowd and somehow weave them into a pattern which it understood.”89 Chapaev’s performance as a proletarian agitator thus complicates the actor-audience binary in a somewhat different manner than the scene at the “Musical Snuffbox.” Whereas Pyotr leaves the crowd for the stage, only to discover an identical face beneath the mask of both actor and audience, Chapaev acts as the conduit for his audience’s collective unconscious while never actually internalizing (or even becoming cognizant of) their beliefs himself. In both cases, the dominant position of the performer over the spectator is shown to be illusory; actor and audience are mutually constitutive of each other and of the performative encounter itself. Paradoxically, Pyotr’s unsuccessful attempt to implement Chapaev’s crowd mirroring technique comes during arguably his most successful performance of Bolshevism. Taking the makeshift stage to recite a revolutionary poem for the weavers’ regiment, Petr tries in vain to forge a mental connection with the assembled men: “[A]lthough the multitude of eyes staring at me were actually alive and I seemed to understand the feeling reflected in them, I knew that they did not express to even the very slightest degree what I was imagining. In reality I would never be able to decode the meaning that glittered in them; indeed, it was probably not worth the effort.”90 Despite finding his audience inscrutable, Pyotr receives a raucous ovation and leaves feeling “intoxicated” by the potential of “genuine art” to reach even “the most hopeless victim of the infernal global trance.”91 By repeating the word “trance,” used above to describe Chapaev’s hypnotic state while speaking, Pyotr draws a subtle contrast between such rhetorical trickery and his own newfound poetic transcendence. His romantic illusions are dispelled, however, after realizing the crowd’s response is based on a purely avaricious interpretation of his verses. Moreover, the modifier “infernal” again hearkens to Bolshevism’s demonic underside, reinforced by Pyotr’s observation regarding two nearby aides-decamp that “the etymology of the term ‘aides’ could be traced back, beyond the 89 Ibid., 77. 90 Ibid., 278. 91 Ibid., 280.

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slightest possible doubt, to the word ‘hades’.”92 Able by now to act the part of a revolutionary wordsmith, therefore, Pyotr nevertheless remains incapable of Chapaev’s mystical bond with his public. In another memorable display of Bolshevik mysticism, Chapaev conjures a lifelike image of Lenin using only the blade of a sword, prompting Pyotr to ask, “Who are you, really?” (“Kto vy na samom dele?”). This is a near-exact quotation of the epigraph to The Master and Margarita, itself originally from Goethe’s Faust: “. . . who are you, then?” [“. . .Tak kto zh ty, nakonets?”] “I am part of that power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good.”93

The question asked by Faust is addressed to the demon Mephistopheles, who bargains for Faust’s soul on behalf of the Devil. By having Pyotr pose this question to Chapaev, Pelevin obliquely associates his Red Army commander with the “petty demon” of Goethe’s tragedy, gesturing once more to the demonic face behind the Bolshevik mask.94 Later, along similar lines, Chapaev slyly dismisses rumors that he has sold his own soul with a Mephistophelean anecdote: “I understand,” said Chapaev. “I know where these rumours come from. There was one person who came here to see me in order to ask how he could sell his soul to the devil. A certain Staff Captain Lambovsky. . . . I explained to him how it can be done, and he performed the entire ritual most punctiliously.” “And what happened?” “Nothing much. He didn’t suddenly acquire riches, or eternal youth either. The only thing that did happen was that in all 92 Ibid., 278. 93 Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (London: Penguin Books, 2016), 1. Indeed, the Faust reference may be a triangulation between Bulgakov, Goethe, and Dostoevsky, whose pawnbroker narrator in the short story “A Gentle Creature” (“Krotkaia,” 1876) likewise introduces himself to the heroine with Mephistopheles’s words. Fyodor Dostoevsky, A Gentle Creature and Other Stories, trans. Alan Meyers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 65. See also Inna Tigountsova, “Dostoevsky’s ‘The Meek One’ (Krotkaia) in the Context of Goethe’s Faust and Tropes of Time,” Modern Language Review 112, no. 2 (2017): 459–474. 94 In Pushkin’s A Scene from Faust (Stsena iz Fausta, 1825), Mephistopheles even refers to himself in this way: “A petty fiend, by might and main/ I did my best to entertain” (“Ia melkim besom izvivalsia/ Razveselit᾿tebia staralsia”). Alexander Pushkin, Boris Godunov and Other Works, trans. James E. Falen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 96.

CHAPTER 4    Masking the Void, Voiding the Mask the regimental documents the name ‘Lambovsky’ was replaced by ‘Serpentovich’.” “Why was that?” “It’s not good to go deceiving others. How can you sell what you haven’t got?”95

While chiding Lambovsky for deceiving others, Chapaev himself deceives the staff captain by facilitating the sale of his (nonexistent) soul for no material benefit. But unlike Pelevin’s other allusions to demonic deception throughout the novel, Chapaev’s motives here are plainly benign. His trick turns out to be a teaching tool, meant to guide Lambovsky (if rather indirectly) towards a more enlightened self-understanding. This Faustian vignette thus illustrates Chapaev’s primary role throughout the novel as a spiritual guru who, to paraphrase a 1920s slogan of the proletarian writers’ association RAPP, “tears off each and every mask from reality.”96 When not showing off his chops as a rabble rouser or practicing some occult form of stagecraft, Chapaev spends his time disabusing Pyotr and his comrades of their notions about the reality of the material world: Chapaev began explaining to Anna that a human personality is like a wardrobe filled with sets of clothes which are taken out by turns, and the less real the person actually is, the more sets there are in the wardrobe. . . . Anna was stubborn and she refused to agree with him. She attempted to prove that what he said was all very well in theory, but it did not apply to her, because she always remained herself and never wore any masks. But Chapaev simply answered everything she said by saying: “One dress . . . Two dresses . . .” and so on. Do you understand? Then Anna asked, if that was the case, who was it that put on the dresses, and Chapaev replied that there was nobody to put them on. That was when Anna understood.97 95 BLF, 296–297. 96 Fitzpatrick, Tear Off the Masks!, 65. 97 BLF, 315. Both this and the previous example play on the Russian cultural phenomenon of the “Chapaev anecdote,” an ever-expanding cycle of jokes typically based on dialogue or situations from the 1934 film Chapaev (dir. Georgy and Sergei Vasilyev). Originating in the popular culture of the late Soviet period, in particular the thirtieth-anniversary celebration of the film’s original release in 1964, the Chapaev anecdote has become one of the canonical subgenres of contemporary Russian humor. See Seth Graham, “A Cultural Analysis of the Russo-Soviet Anekdot” (PhD diss., University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, 2003), 175–190.

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Here is perhaps the most overtly performative expression of Pelevin’s overarching philosophy of emptiness in the entire novel. Chapaev’s demonstration with the dresses is aimed not at refuting Anna’s claims to “always remain herself ” and “never wear any masks,” but at the very distinction between self and mask as ontological categories. In his terminology, there is no real person (self) concealed beneath the various garments; all identities are mere pretense, exercises in theatricality that mask the underlying void of human existence. At the same time, however, Chapaev’s analogy allows for degrees of unreality: “the less real the person actually is, the more sets [of clothing] there are in the wardrobe.”98 If all self-presentations are fraudulent, therefore, some are more fraudulent than others.

Conclusion: History Unmasked With this caveat about differing degrees of unreality in mind, it becomes possible to reconcile Pelevin’s “unmasking” of Bolshevism in the Civil War timeline of Chapaev and the Void with his general fixation on the illusory nature of all realities, historical or otherwise. On the one hand, it is clear that Pelevin sees Bolshevik imposture as a historically specific manifestation of a universal human characteristic rather than a sui generis phenomenon. The Red Army troops under Chapaev’s command, he writes, “had been deceived since childhood, and in essence nothing had changed for them because now they were simply being deceived in a different fashion.”99 On the other hand, it is equally clear that Pelevin considers Bolshevism a distinctive and pernicious enough form of imposture to warrant special attention. This is evident in at least two specific ways. First, Pelevin repeatedly associates Bolshevik self-presentation with the masking of a demonic presence, one he has credited elsewhere with the continuous reproduction of the performance called Russian history. Inasmuch as Chapaev and the Void can be said to have a historiographic project, it is interrupting this “false” performance of the past in favor of a Buddhistic embrace of the void.100 Doing so, however, requires first voiding the mask behind which

 98 BLF, 315.  99 Ibid., 74–75. 100 “Every time the concept and the image of Russia appears in your conscious mind, you have to let it dissolve away in its own inner nature. And since the concept and the image of Russia has no inner nature of its own, the result is that everything is sorted out most satisfactorily.” Ibid., 326.

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the petty demon conceals itself. One of these masks (though not the only one) is that of the Red commissar. Second, in Pelevin’s estimation, Bolshevism represents a delusionally imperious form of performativity, one placing undue weight on the “actor” side of the actor-audience relationship. Grigory’s questions to Pyotr (“Think about it, who would you rather be right now? An actor or a member of the audience?”) provide the most explicit framing of this hierarchy, but Bolshevik belief in the absolute power of performance is a recurring motif throughout the novel’s historical timeline. For Pelevin, the asymmetry of such a vanguardist performative dynamic inevitably leads to deception; as Chapaev tells Pyotr before one of his poetry readings, “the bored public . . . must continue to believe that everyone here is of one mind.”101 Self-deception, however, is just as crucial to Pelevin’s interpretation of Bolshevism. Russian revolutionaries may believe themselves to be “putting on a show the likes of which you can’t imagine,” but for their audience, revolution is little more than a “stupid charade played out by people who [are] entirely unconnected to them.”102 In the end, Pelevin emphasizes, neither actors nor audience can direct the performance of history to their desired denouement. Power, whether political or performative, is ultimately just another illusion; “when viewed from the perspective of reality,” as Pyotr comes to understand, “no hierarchy remains for the activities in which people engage.”103 The obvious parallel here is to authorship, and Pelevin is nothing if not appropriately postmodern in undermining his own privileged narrative position.104 His restaging of Russia’s twentieth century in Chapaev and the Void makes no claims to authority or accuracy, not even of the “alternative history” variety, relying instead on the reader to sort through a kaleidoscopic array of fictionalized historical personages and divergent temporal paths.105 That the novel’s historical content recedes before its own dramatic representation could be taken as conclusive evidence of its author’s indifference, or indeed hostility, to the notion of meaningful pasts. Still, Pelevin’s professed historiographical nihilism itself masks a nuanced understanding of the contexts in which his narratives are set, as well as a savvy appreciation for how real history can be manipulated for creative effect. 101 Ibid., 271. 102 Ibid., 6, 75. 103 Ibid., 272. 104 Regarding his own poetry, Pyotr speaks of having “long suspected that authorship is a dubious concept.” Ibid., 275. 105 Khagi, “Alternative Historical Imagination in Viktor Pelevin,” 486–491.

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“The Battle for Your Mind”: Western Social Theory in Generation ‘∏’ DYLAN OGDEN, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

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arly on in Victor Pelevin’s novel Generation ‘П’ (1999), translated into English as Homo Zapiens or Babylon, the protagonist, a poet-turnedcopywriter named Vavilen Tatarsky, is introduced to an American marketing book entitled Positioning: A Battle for Your Mind (1980).1 Tatarsky latches onto the text, rereading it multiple times and even referring to it as his “little Bible,” despite having come to the conclusion that “its essential message is entirely inapplicable to Russia.”2 This seeming contradiction draws attention to how the book’s perceived value lies not so much in its content, but rather in its surface-level impression: it is an influential Western text which contains English terms like “line extension” that Tatarsky uses to impress clueless clients. Tatarsky, in other words, only engages with the text insofar as he can manipulate these superficial elements to suit his pragmatic needs. From this perspective, his approach to Western marketing books mirrors his approach to

1 The book, co-written by Al Ries and Jack Trout, became a best-seller shortly after publication. It focuses on strategies for differentiating a given brand or product in a crowded marketplace in order to boost its memorability and status in the eyes of consumers. As of the original publication of Generation ‘П’, the book had not yet been translated into Russian, though it was eventually translated in 2004. 2 Victor Pelevin, Homo Zapiens, trans. Andrew Bromfield (New York: Penguin, 2000), 17–18.

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the Western brands he advertises—the actual products are usually irrelevant and often interchangeable, but the impression they make is key. Beyond such references to American marketing guides, many Pelevin scholars have also noted the influence of twentieth-century Western cultural critics on the novel.3 Sofya Khagi, for example, observes that Pelevin’s depiction of post-Soviet social transformation in the novel is “heavily informed by Western intellectuals’ criticism of the electronic age with its mass conformity and boundless possibilities for the manipulation of consciousness.”4 This prominent use of Western theoretical positions in the novel suggests an implicit comparison between Pelevin, the writer, and Tatarsky, the copywriter, which seems to anticipate the accusation that Pelevin is only referencing fashionable theory to impress Russian readers just like Tatarsky. Such a comparison is further strengthened by the biographical similarities between author and character: Khagi points out that, among other things, they both studied engineering and attended the same Literary Institute in Moscow. But unlike Tatarsky’s reading of Positioning, it becomes clear that Pelevin’s incorporation of these theorists over the course of the novel is not a matter of incidental name-checking, but rather an active and deliberate process of interpreting, adapting and responding to the issues being raised by Western theorists. This chapter will survey what Pelevin scholars have written about the novel’s dialogue with Western theory. In particular, I am concerned with how the novel engages in a philosophical discourse with several major theorists of modern media and capitalist culture, including Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord, Herbert Marcuse, Fredric Jameson, and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, on matters such as the contentious status of “reality” in contemporary society, conceptions of desire and its interrelationship with capitalism, and whether it is possible to resist the inherent oppression of contemporary capitalist society. This analysis will also explore how exactly Pelevin frames the novel’s relationship to theory in general. I see Pelevin’s tendency to take theoretical metaphors quite literally as a playful and self-conscious assertion of the novel’s ambiguous attitude towards the social theories referenced within it. He exaggerates concepts adopted from individual theorists in a way that blurs the boundaries In addition to Positioning: A Battle for Your Mind, Tatarsky also references a follow-up book, The New Positioning (1995), as well as David Ogilvy’s Confessions of an Advertising Man (1963), and a book by Rosser Reeves, which goes unnamed, but can be contextually inferred to be Reality and Advertising (1961). 4 Sofya Khagi, “From Homo Sovieticus to Homo Zapiens: Victor Pelevin’s Consumer Dystopia,” The Russian Review 67, no. 4 (2008): 562. 3

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between serious engagement and pastiche. Taking this playful approach into account, the following chapter will give a broad overview of the theoretical terrain in which the novel is operating, bringing together existing scholarship on the novel’s relation to Western theory alongside a consideration of the ongoing discourses surrounding the specific theorists and concepts alluded to by Pelevin.

Spectacles and Simulacra The phantasmagorical depiction of post-Soviet Russia in Generation ‘П’ portrays a world in which everything has been transformed into a commodity. Western brands like Nike, Coca-Cola, and Gucci have become ingrained in social consciousness, literature has been reduced to raw material for advertisements, and even the attempt to create a “Russian idea” is nothing more than part of a broader strategy for selling mazuma.5 This commodification of reality brings to mind two theoretical concepts: Guy Debord’s “contemporary spectacle” and Jean Baudrillard’s “simulacra.” While there are important distinctions between the theoretical positions of Debord and Baudrillard, both are interested in the ways modern capitalism encroaches on society’s conception of reality, turning the entire world around us into a marketplace. Over the course of two books, Society of the Spectacle (1967) and Comments on Society of the Spectacle (1988), Debord analyzes how the spectacle replaces lived experience with a system of representations that mediates society by way of images. These representations, disseminated through media, news, advertising, and entertainment, amount in total to a worldview that has become separated from reality, one shaped by, and in turn reinforcing, the ruling economic system of capitalism. As a result of these distortions, Debord observes, “commodities are now all that there is to see; the world we see is the world of the commodity.”6 Society of the Spectacle outlines a distinction between “concentrated spectacle” and “diffuse spectacle.” In its concentrated form, spectacle is enforced by a centralized bureaucracy, usually headed by an individual dictatorial personality. The State takes direct control over virtually all aspects of the economy through the employment of coercive violence. This form of power is directly reminiscent of fascist or Stalinist regimes, but Debord does clarify that

5 Mazuma (from Yiddish mezumen) means cash/money (often criminal) in US slang. 6 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 1995), 29.

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“even the most advanced capitalism may call on it in moments of crisis.”7 By contrast, “diffuse spectacle” is achieved through a decentralized flow of commodities, in which social good is embodied not by an individual leader, but by commodity production in general. Debord’s conceptions of the spectacle undergo a subtle yet significant modification between the first and the second books. In Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, Debord claims that modern capitalism has merged elements of both these models, concentrated and diffuse spectacle, to establish a stronger form of spectacular power that he calls “integrated spectacle.” In this form, the economy is organized by a centralized bureaucracy, but it takes a covert form: “The controlling center has now become occult: never to be occupied by a known leader, or clear ideology.”8 Debord uses the term “occult” in a figurative sense. Occult power has nothing to do with the mystical or supernatural, but it does exist behind the scenes, invisible to the eyes of the population. Debord uses the Mafia as an example of what this power looks like: It can only exist on account of its invisibility, an effect maintained through strict secrecy and obfuscation, and yet it integrates itself seamlessly into the political and economic landscape of modern capitalism. Thus, Debord concludes, “The Mafia is not an outsider in this world; it is perfectly at home. Indeed, in the integrated spectacle it stands as the model of all advanced commercial enterprises.”9 Furthermore, access to the truth behind the integrated spectacle is elusive even to those who are in control: Idiots believe that everything is clear. The demi-elite is content to know that almost everything is obscure, ambivalent, “constructed” by unknown codes. A more exclusive elite would like to know what is true, hard as it is to distinguish in each particular case, despite all their access to special knowledge and confidences.10

A similar system of occult power is introduced in Generation ‘П’ in the “Institute for Apiculture,” though in this case it is in fact a cult to the Sumerian goddess Ishtar. This cult fabricates the entire Russian government and political sphere through CGI (computer-generated imagery) disseminated by mass   7 Ibid., 43.   8 Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, trans. Malcolm Imrie (London: Verso, 1998), 9.   9 Ibid., 67. 10 Ibid., 59–60.

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media. The lack of clear ideology guiding the Institute’s actions is made readily apparent in a brief exchange during Tatarsky’s job interview: “Is there anything at all that you believe in?” he asked. “No,” said Tatarsky. “Well, that’s good,” said Azadovsky.11

The Institute seeks out Russians who have no particular political or ideological opinions because any such beliefs would conflict with the Institute’s purpose of keeping the economic system running at all costs to support Ishtar, the novel’s goddess of desire. The Institute’s directive is similar to the centralized power of the integrated spectacle, which “answers the imperative demand of the new conditions for profitable management of economic affairs at a time when . . . demand for all commodities depends strictly on the centralization achieved by spectacular information/promotion.”12 In both cases, the economic system is too complex and far-reaching to be efficiently managed by a diffuse, laissezfaire approach—it needs to be managed, streamlined, and coordinated by an invisible controlling center in order to maximize the flow of capital. It is also significant that nobody at the Institute understands how this system functions—another element that Debord observes in the integrated spectacle. Tatarsky is repeatedly told not to ask too many questions, and when he does inquire about the underlying structure of the Institute’s activities, he is harshly rebuked by one of his colleagues, who pinches Tatarsky hard enough to draw blood and responds: “Don’t you ever . . . think about that. Not ever, get it?”13 Tatarsky’s question is terrifying because here is no answer: the contradictory, inscrutable system of the Institute is guided by nothing but itself. Even the Goddess Ishtar only manifests in advertising images, and, since the Institute coordinates the creation and distribution of advertisements, this presents a circular logic in which the Institute creates the very goddess it is meant to serve. While most of the employees at the Institute fall into the category of the demi-elite, Tatarsky’s persistent questioning places him in the position of an exclusive elite who wants to understand what is really going on. In his quest for knowledge, however, he ultimately comes up short, finding no definitive

11 Pelevin, Homo Zapiens, 153. 12 Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, 69. 13 Pelevin, Homo Zapiens, 175.

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logic or reason on which the whole system is based—a realization that matches Debord’s conclusions.14 But while truth is indeterminate beneath the distorting effects of spectacle, Debord’s theory still relies on the notion of a reality that exists outside of spectacle. The two are closely intertwined: “The spectacle, though it turns reality on its head, is a product of real activity. Likewise, lived reality suffers from the material assaults of the spectacle’s mechanisms of contemplation.”15 The sociologist Jean Baudrillard goes a step further. His theory of simulacra rejects any appeal to reality in describing modern capitalist society. Simulacra, according to Baudrillard, are a system of signs that claim to model reality without being grounded in any origin or real thing outside themselves. Like Debord, Baudrillard is interested in the ways that mass media and government institutions create unreal visions of the world. For Baudrillard, however, these signs do not so much distort reality as replace it altogether with a “hyperreality” made up of simulacra. In his essay “The Precession of Simulacra” (1981), Baudrillard argues, contra Debord: “We are no longer in the society of the spectacle which the Situationists talked about, nor in the specific types of alienation and repression which this implied.”16 The society of the spectacle, according to Baudrillard, relies on a model of perspectival observation in which a subject views reality through the distorted lens of mass media, implying a distinction between reality and the medium through which one observes said reality. What has changed, he proposes, is that the medium through which we view “reality” is no longer distinguishable from the real itself. As a result, “[t]here is no longer a medium in the literal sense: it is now intangible, diffused, and diffracted in the real, and one can no longer even say that the medium is altered by it.”17 Using television 14 For more analysis of Debord’s integrated spectacle in relation to Pelevin’s later novels, including The Sacred Book of the Werewolf (Sviashchennaia kniga oborotnia, 2004), The Helmet of Horror (Shlem uzhasa, 2005) and Empire V (2006), see Isabelle Després, “Loupgarou, Minotaure et vampires: quelques représentations du pouvoir dans la prose de Viktor Pelevine,” in Du Grand Inquisiteur à Big Brother, le pouvoir dans la littérature et les arts de la fin du XIX siècle à nos jours, ed. Anna Saignes and Agathe Salha (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2013). 15 Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 14. 16 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 20. 17 Ibid., 20. In this passage, Baudrillard is explicitly drawing on the work of Marshall McLuhan, a Canadian media scholar who coined the term “the medium is the message.” Pelevin also references this phrase during Tatarsky’s ritualistic marriage to Ishtar at the end of the novel.

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as an example of this diffusion, Baudrillard claims that even reality TV neither reflects nor observes reality in any traditional sense. Instead, the TV program is so deeply ingrained in the reality it claims to depict that it stops being spectacle and becomes a reality in and of itself. Baudrillard’s concept of simulacra has been applied to Generation ‘П’ in a number of ways. Mark Lipovetsky, for instance, argues that Pelevin’s critique of mass media in the novel shares notable connections with Baudrillard’s philosophy: “[Baudrillard] was the one who first spoke about how TV, and especially advertising, blurs the line between real and illusory, creating a massive flow of virtual images of power and desire.”18 According to Lipovetsky, Pelevin’s oeuvre does not merely reveal the fiction underpinning Soviet and post-Soviet simulacra, as did many other Russian postmodernists, but shows how these simulacra can in turn recreate reality in the manner of Baudrillard’s hyperreality. More specifically, he notes a clear connection between the “virtual politicians” created by the Institute of Apiculture and the replacement of politics with simulacra that Baudrillard describes in his book “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place” (1991). In that book, Baudrillard claims that the Gulf War was a constructed media event hyped by both sides of the conflict on the logic of speculation and appearances in a self-conscious effort to seem like a real combat. Building off this link between Baudrillard’s book and Generation ‘П’, Sofya Khagi claims that “if Baudrillard still leaves room for a metaphorical reading of his provocative thesis about the Gulf War, with some provisional ‘reality’ beyond the virtual warfare presented for the benefit of the populace, then Pelevin’s politicians are literally disembodied.”19 Boris Noordenbos, meanwhile, analyzes the virtual politics of simulacra in Generation ‘П’ from the perspective of the cultural divide between Russia and the West. He observes that in the novel, “Democracy stays a meaningless and empty concept, imported and almost literally ‘nurtured’ by the West.”20 The fact that Russia’s democratic institutions turn out to be illusory is not merely a critique of Russian politics, but of the artificial nature of these Western concepts in the Russian context: “Pelevin’s Russia, in this sense, seems to be constructed A more detailed account of McLuhan’s influence on Baudrillard can be found in Gary Genosco’s McLuhan and Baudrillard: Masters of Implosion (London: Routledge, 1999). 18 Mark Lipovetskii, Paralogii: Transformatsii (post)modernistskogo diskursa v russkoi kul′ture 1920–2000-kh godov (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2008), 428. 19 Khagi, “From Homo Sovieticus to Homo Zapiens: Viktor Pelevin’s Consumer Dystopia,” 563. 20 Boris Noordenbos, “Breaking into a New Era? A Cultural-Semiotic Reading of Viktor Pelevin,” Russian Literature 64, no. 1 (2008): 103.

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out of signs that have meaning merely in the West, but in Russia take the shape of a simulacrum.”21 Democracy and capitalism emerged gradually in the West, in reaction to political and technological shifts over time, which grant these terms meaning. In Russia they are simply artificial constructs, lacking any basis in experienced reality. Whereas in Baudrillard’s view, all modern democracies are simulacra, none being any more real or meaningful than the rest, in Noordenbos’s reading, the unreality of concepts like democracy is a localized phenomenon, one more pronounced in Russia than it is in the West. Much in the same way that Generation ‘П’ transforms Debord’s occult power into a literal secret cult, Pelevin’s novel makes Baudrillard’s notion of virtual politics concrete by presenting a political system that exists only in the form of digital simulacra. In both cases Pelevin erases the distinction between metaphor and the concept to which it refers. He effectively reifies these theories, transforming them from abstract concepts into entities that are already a step removed from their source. Given that Debord and Baudrillard both focused on the potential for representations to distort or mislead, Pelevin’s use of theory presents an ironic complication. The literalized metaphors in Generation ‘П’ are obviously exaggerated, but can they still serve as a basis for genuine philosophical dialogue between the novel and the theoretical works it references? Or are these representations caricatures of the theories they claim to present? There does not seem to be an unambiguous answer here. Pelevin not only applies theory in the novel, but also self-reflexively draws attention to his processes of engaging with theory, and does so right alongside the potential complications this produces. Pelevin’s science-fiction-style realization of Baudrillard’s simulacra carries added weight, since Baudrillard himself has been accused of exaggerating his own concepts to fantastic extremes. For instance, the scholar Deborah Cook, in her essay “Symbolic Exchange in Hyperreality” (1994) asserts that “for Baudrillard, the media’s power is virtually limitless. He indulges in hyperbole which borders on the paranoiac.”22 Cook critiques Baudrillard’s exclusive focus on the unidirectional and supposedly all-powerful medium of television as essentially a conspiracy theory, leading him to ignore other forms of media that allow for reciprocal communication like the telephone and the internet. Responding indirectly to this kind of critique in the introduction to 21 Ibid., 104. 22 Deborah Cook, “Symbolic Exchange in Hyperreality,” in Baudrillard: A Critical Reader, ed. Douglas Kellner (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1994), 160.

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Baudrillard: A Critical Reader (1994), Douglas Kellner observes that “one can thus read Baudrillard as a form of science fiction and pataphysics or a form of serious social theory and cultural metaphysics. . . . Baudrillard himself, it seems, wants it both ways and thus opens the way for either a serious or non-serious reading.”23 By turning Baudrillard’s theoretical ideas into obviously fictional manifestations like the computer-generated government, Pelevin can be understood to similarly blur the boundary between playful humor and absolute seriousness, drawing attention to the very real instability of contemporary Russian society by way of absurd exaggerations. The simultaneous reference to Debord and Baudrillard in Generation ‘П’ raises the question of how, or if, Pelevin addresses the conflicting conceptions of reality expressed by the theorists. Debord presents a dialectical model of reality and spectacle, wherein the spectacle emerges from the real and distorts our perception of it. The primary goal of the Situationists, a left-wing political organization that Debord helped found, was to disrupt and counteract State-constructed spectacles so the underlying reality can be made apparent. Baudrillard, on the other hand, takes a more pessimistic stance towards the real, which in his view has been effectively banished from modern society by the hyperreality of simulacra, only lingering on here and there in impotent tatters that he refers to as the “desert of the real.”24 The scholar Sally Dalton-Brown offers a reading of Generation ‘П’ that sheds light on this question when she compares Pelevin’s novel to the works of the Canadian author Douglas Coupland. Both writers, she claims, explore the “dialectics of emptiness,” which she defines as testing “whether the character can awaken from the de-animated state of reification in which void is hidden under commodity and attain a non-commodified existence, or ‘antithetical void’, an opposing, more free state of emptiness.”25 From this perspective, Pelevin looks beneath the capitalist spectacle of modern Russia, but what he 23 Douglas Kellner, introduction to Baudrillard: A Critical Reader, 17. 24 This distinction between Debord and Baudrillard has been partially contested by the scholar Steven Best in his essay “The Commodification of Reality: Baudrillard, Debord, and Postmodern Theory,” published in Baudrillard: A Critical Reader. Best argues that Debord’s early work, including the original Society of the Spectacle, does confirm this distinction between the two philosophers. By the time Debord writes the later Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, however, Best claims that Debord’s revised notion of the integrated spectacle is portrayed as so indestructible that there is no longer any serious hope of opposing it, therefore bringing his stance closer to that of Baudrillard’s. 25 Sally Dalton-Brown, “The Dialectics of Emptiness: Douglas Coupland’s and Viktor Pelevin’s Tales of Generation X and P,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 42, no. 3 (2006): 239.

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seeks is not reality but a more all-encompassing nothingness that escapes the boundaries of commodification. This liberating conception of nothingness comes not from Debord or Baudrillard, but rather from the Buddhist belief that all of reality is illusion, not just the technical simulacra that Baudrillard describes. As is the case in many of Pelevin’s novels, the Buddhist understanding of nothingness opens up an alternative to the consumer void that plagues modern Russia, since the manipulative distortions of capitalism become irrelevant if there is never any “real” to be accessed in the first place. In Buddhist terms, the contemplation of nothingness becomes an ideal, a way of freeing oneself from the illusions of the material world.26 For Pelevin, then, nothingness must be understood in a dualistic sense: The simulacra of capitalist society lead to the emptying-out of the individual, their identity and desires, but this same system exists within a deeper, more all-encompassing void, one that offers a modicum of hope for those seeking an escape from the dehumanizing signs of commodities and television. Meghan Vicks has identified this dualism as a central concern of Pelevin’s oeuvre: “Pelevin’s work demonstrates how nothing is both the crisis of and the salvation from post-Soviet existence.”27 In her reading of Generation ‘П’ nothingness is portrayed as profoundly pessimistic, when it takes the form of empty and meaningless capitalist simulacra. One example she cites is the primitive organism of capitalism, known as Oranus, which Tatarsky learns about mid-way through the novel. Oranus is made up of human beings as its cells, and it manipulates these cells into producing a constant stream of money. Vicks draws attention to the incorporeal nature of this organism that “ingests and eliminates emptiness,”28 noting its lack of physical or mental characteristics. Thus, “[t]his depiction of Oranus crystalizes the notion that pustota/emptiness is the nature of all things: it is the product of capitalism, the essence of man, the status of art, and the only truth and reality in the novel’s post-Soviet world.”29 Despite this nihilistic conclusion, Vicks goes on to analyze how a sacred notion of nothingness plays a more optimistic role as a transcendental source of creation in some of Pelevin’s 26 The role of Buddhism in Pelevin’s fiction as a means for resolving capitalist anxieties of simulacra and hyper-materialism is elaborated in Rebecca Stakun, Terror and Transcendence in the Void: Viktor Pelevin’s Philosophy of Emptiness (PhD diss., University of Kansas, Lawrence, 2017). 27 Meghan Vicks, Narratives of Nothing in 20th-Century Literature (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2015), 142. 28 Pelevin, Homo Zapiens, 84. 29 Vicks, Narratives of Nothing in 20th-Century Literature, 147.

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other novels, including Chapaev and the Void (Chapaev i pustota, 1996) and The Sacred Book of the Werewolf (Sviashchennaia kniga oborotnia, 2004). Bringing together Vicks’s and Dalton-Brown’s interpretations of emptiness in Generation ‘П’, it seems that Pelevin’s take on the debate between Debord and Baudrillard is not to pick one side over the other, but to subtly shift the terms of the debate from the question of reality to the question of nothingness. Whereas Debord presents a dialectical model of reality and spectacle, Pelevin’s position aligns more closely with Baudrillard’s hyperreal network of simulacra devoid of underlying reality. However, for Pelevin there is something that lies outside Baudrillard’s hyperreality: a liberating conception of nothingness. Even if this sacred nothingness is ultimately absent from Generation ‘П’, the search for it plays a role analogous to Debord’s project to reclaim reality. Both efforts resist Baudrillard’s conclusion that there is nothing beyond simulacra.

Capitalism and Desire The parasitic figure of Oranus is closely related to another theme that Pelevin develops in depth throughout the novel: the interrelationship between human desire and the flow of capital. To guarantee the continuous flow of capital, Oranus sends out three types of impulses that limit all human desire to the narrow confines of commodities and money: oral, anal, and displacing wow-impulses. The oral and anal wow-impulses are a complementary pair, the former causes people to want money in order to live the life promised to them in advertisements, and the latter encourages them to spend that money; in both cases the specific consumer items being sought and bought are secondary to the movement of capital. The last wow-impulse solidifies Oranus’s domination of its cells by limiting what they are even capable of desiring: “Under the influence of the displacing impulse, which blocks out all psychological processes that are not directly related to the circulation of money, the world comes to be seen exclusively as the embodiment of Oranus.”30 Between these three impulses, money comes to define every aspect of a person’s existence, turning them into empty “identities” that are constructed from their participation in the flow of capital. The German philosopher Herbert Marcuse developed a similar model of the close-mindedness enforced by capitalist society in his book, OneDimensional Man (1964). There Marcuse defines “one-dimensional thought” 30 Pelevin, Homo Zapiens, 84.

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in terms similar to Pelevin’s displacing wow-impulse, describing it as a state in which “ideas, aspirations, and objectives that, by their content, transcend the established universe of discourse and action are either repelled or reduced to the terms of this universe.”31 Marcuse attributes this state to the diffusion of economic and technological ideology into reality, much like the prominent role of capitalism and television in the functioning of Oranus in Generation ‘П’. The result is the same: anything that exists outside the universe of modern capitalism must be integrated into it or dispensed with altogether. Pelevin also links the image of one-dimensionality to desire and the flow of capital through the motif of the line, a one-dimensional figure. The description of Oranus specifies how identities hollowed out by wow-impulses arrange themselves in a linear corporate string “like fish threaded on a line. . . . Under the influence of the oral and anal wow-factors, they crawl, as it were, along the corporate string in the direction they think of as up.”32 From this description, it becomes clear that movement along the line does not mean teleological movement towards any particular goal; “up” and “down” are meaningless terms without any point of reference, and the flow of capital produced by these crawling identities is merely movement for its own sake. They are given the mere illusion of an end goal—promises of happiness, success, love, and so forth, that are arbitrarily linked to sufficient wealth to acquire products and perform commodified lifestyles. The imagery of one-dimensionality is developed later in the novel when Tatarsky takes acid and reads a text about Enkidu, a Mesopotamian god who gathers up beads that had fallen off his mother’s rosary and turned into people. He does so with a magical golden thread that impels the bead-people to crawl up the thread using their mouths and anuses to push themselves upwards. During the ensuing hallucination, the connection between Enkidu and Oranus is made more overt when Tatarsky is informed that the beads were people all along who had convinced themselves that they were beads, and that the beads are none other than the identities which serve Oranus. This complicated interconnection of fantastical images corresponds to Marcuse’s model of the one-dimensional man that the hegemonic dominance of capitalist ideology imposes on individuals and society as a whole. It is unclear whether Pelevin is deliberately literalizing Marcuse’s theory the way he does 31 Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: The Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (London: Sphere Books, 1964), 12. 32 Pelevin, Homo Zapiens, 89.

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with Debord and Baudrillard, or if his use of one-dimensionality just happens to coincide with Marcuse’s theory. In any case, Pelevin’s use of the line imagery must be understood as an exaggeration of real-world tendencies, one that promotes metaphor to the level of the literal. The French philosophers Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari present a more optimistic model for the intersection between desire and capitalism in Generation ‘П’. Dalton-Brown, for instance, sees Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of a “desiring-lack” dynamic as particularly relevant. She defines this as “manufacturing need to assist the market economy through an empty commodification that never satisfies but leads to increased craving.”33 This is analogous to Pelevin’s oral and anal wow-impulses, which trap individuals in a cycle of making and spending money in an effort to reach an ideal self that is a fictional construct of advertising. Significantly, for Pelevin and for Deleuze and Guattari, desire can be a double-edged sword that both supports and threatens capitalism. In the terminology of the French theorists, desire is an abstract notion disembodied from any specific subjectivity. It is not to be found within anything, but instead creates a connective synthesis between things—between one object/idea/concept and another, from that one to another, and so forth, in a complex web of interconnections. Capitalism radically decodes flows of desire. That is, it is no longer limited by the forms or structures which earlier societies had used to set the possible directions for desire to flow because such boundaries inhibit the flow of capital. At the same time, they stress that capitalism places its own limits on desire—everything must circle back around to money.34 Deleuze and Guattari contrast the controlled desire of capitalism to the completely free flow of desire that they refer to as “schizophrenia.” In their use of the term, schizophrenia takes on a broader meaning than the pathological diagnosis to which it usually refers, amounting to a process of radical interconnectivity among concepts that disrupts any established order. Clinical schizophrenia is only a limited and unsuccessful form of this interconnectivity, as Brian Massumi explains: “For them, the clinical schizophrenic’s debilitating detachment from the world is a quelled attempt to engage it in unimagined

33 Dalton-Brown, “The Dialectics of Emptiness: Douglas Coupland’s and Viktor Pelevin’s Tales of Generation X and P,” 245. 34 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Mark Seem, Robert Hurley, and Helen R. Lane (New York: Viking Press, 1997), 246.

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ways.”35 This form of schizophrenic desire presents a threat to capitalism because it takes the decoding of desire to its ultimate extreme. Whereas capitalism encourages the free flow of desire in all directions so long as it remains connected to capital, this requirement breaks down in the schizophrenic context: “One can say that schizophrenia is the exterior limit of capitalism itself or the conclusion of its deepest tendency, but that capitalism only functions on the condition that it inhibit this tendency, or that it push back or displace this limit, by substituting for it its own immanent relative limits.”36 This inherent tension between desire and capitalism becomes, in the hands of Deleuze and Guattari, a means of resisting the otherwise all-encompassing pull of capitalism in modern society. Thus, in the introduction to the 1977 Viking Press edition of their Anti-Oedipus (1972), Mark Seem describes Deleuze and Guattari’s project as a form of intellectual, anti-establishment militancy that “would learn from madness but then move beyond it, beyond disconnections and deterritorializations, to ever new connections.”37 Dalton-Brown brings this discussion back to Generation ‘П’, raising the possibility that when Tatarsky becomes the consort of the goddess Ishtar at the end of the novel, he transforms into a sort of “body without organs,” a term from Deleuze and Guattari that describes the point at which schizophrenic desire manifests itself to the utmost degree, rejecting all organs or structures that would impose any order on it. The body without organs is therefore not an object or concept but a set of practices that enact schizophrenia in the broad sense of the term. Dalton-Brown concludes that the possibility of transcending capitalism in Generation ‘П’ by becoming a body without organs is left doubtful, since “[t]he final liberated image of Tatarsky walking in open countryside towards a blue sky is after all no more than an advert for Tuborg.”38 Tatarsky becomes a body without organs, a virtual being capable of endless multiplication and interconnection, but in the end there is nothing left to connect with beyond the commodified world of capitalism. The utopian escape from the capitalist system conjured up by the calming, pastoral imagery of the last lines of the book is an illusion propagated by the system itself.

35 Brian Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari (Boston, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 1. 36 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 246. 37 Ibid., xxiii. 38 Dalton-Brown, “The Dialectics of Emptiness: Douglas Coupland’s and Viktor Pelevin’s Tales of Generation Xand P,” 246.

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Dalton-Brown links this pessimistic take on Deleuze and Guattari’s “body without organs” to Slavoj Žižek’s critique of Deleuze in his book The Organ without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences (2004). Among other objections, Žižek argues against what he sees as “those aspects of Deleuzianism that, while masquerading as radical chic, effectively transform Deleuze into an ideologist of today’s ‘digital capitalism.’”39 According to Žižek, Deleuze’s focus on subversive possibilities of “exploding the limits of self-contained subjectivity” and “opening oneself up to a multitude of desires which push us to the limit” does not destabilize capitalism, as Deleuze and Guattari argue, but instead intensifies its growth.40 Thus, if Tatarsky’s transformation into a virtual, de-subjectified entity at the end of the novel is understood as him becoming a body without organs (in both the literal and Deleuzian sense), then it would follow that Pelevin’s position on the emancipatory potential of pure schizophrenic desire aligns with Žižek. Tatarsky does not transcend capitalism. He becomes the face of it.

(Im)possibilities of Resistance The theme of escaping or otherwise resisting capitalism is a common issue addressed by many twentieth-century Western theorists, and there are a wide variety of stances on if and how this goal might be achieved. As I established above, Deleuze and Guattari see the opening up of desire as a means of resisting capitalist domination, but other theorists look for alternative means. Baudrillard, for instance, advocates what he calls nihilistic terrorism as a reaction against the hegemony of the state in his essay “On Nihilism” (1984): “If being a nihilist is carrying, to the unbearable limit of hegemonic systems, this radical trait of derision and of violence . . . then I am a terrorist and nihilist in theory as the others are with their weapons. Theoretical violence, not truth, is the only resource left us.”41 But he goes on to write that even this strategy offers meager hope against a system which is itself nihilistic, since any “nihilism of radicality” is rendered powerless by the system’s own “nihilism of neutrality,” which “has the power to pour everything, including what denies it, into indifference”42 Elsewhere, he suggests a strategy of resistive reception, which 39 Slavoj Žižek, Organs without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences (London: Routledge, 2016), xii. 40 Ibid., 183. 41 Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 107. 42 Ibid.

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consists of refusing to respond to the media that demands their attention— for instance, by deliberately not contributing accurate information to public polls—as “a parodic behavior of disappearance” that mirrors the way television causes the individual to disappear.43 This strategy is not revolutionary in nature, but it is a way of at least demonstrating protest against the system, using its own logic. A parallel could be drawn to the Buddhistic techniques for watching TV told to Tatarsky by his former classmate Gireev. The first method involves watching TV with the sound turned off, the second method with the sound turned on but the screen turned off, and the final method is just staring at the screen with the TV completely turned off. The goal of these techniques, as Gireev explains, is “when you get the idea that they’re saying something important and interesting on television, you become aware of the thought at the moment it arises and so neutralize it.”44 By actively rejecting television’s entreaties to engage one’s attention, one preempts the ability to suck away the humanity of the person watching it, thereby protecting at least some degree of the viewer’s autonomy against the forces of capital/Oranus. Marcuse is slightly more optimistic than Baudrillard about the possibility of a revolutionary break from capitalism, though he too recognizes capitalism’s ability to absorb and neutralize any mode of protest. In the introduction to One-Dimensional Man, he makes this conflict quite clear, writing that the book “will vacillate throughout between two contradictory hypotheses: (1) that advanced industrial society is capable of containing qualitative change for the foreseeable future; (2) that forces and tendencies exist which may break this containment and explode the society. I do not think a clear answer can be given.”45 On the side of the second hypothesis, Marcuse tentatively notes that there are “large areas within and without” advanced industrial societies where the tendencies of one-dimensional culture do not prevail—or at least, he quickly adds, “do not yet prevail.”46 On the other hand, Marcuse claims that modern society is in the process of liquidating the “oppositional, alien, and transcendent elements in the higher culture,” citing art and literature as particular examples that have been transformed into politically inert commodities on the same level as commercials. As 43 Jean Baudrillard and Marie Maclean, “The Masses: The Implosion of the Social in the Media,” New Literary History 16, no. 3 (1985): 583. 44 Pelevin, Homo Zapiens, 221. 45 Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: The Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society, xv. 46 Ibid., xvii.

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Khagi argues, Generation ‘П’ draws attention to its own position in this process, offering a repudiation of modern capitalism in the form of a book being sold on the open marketplace. This creates a dissonance wherein “it is up to the reader to decide whether the novel offers a compelling critique of consumer society, problematized or not, and whether the self-subversive elements of his work are contained in dystopian subversion or vice versa.”47 For both Pelevin and Marcuse, it would seem, the possibility of meaningfully resisting capitalism from within can only be a tentative proposition. The philosopher and literary critic Fredric Jameson describes the phenomenon of anti-capitalist critique being reabsorbed into capitalism itself as an instance of the impossibility of establishing “critical distance.” In his Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), Jameson states: “No theory of cultural politics current on the Left today has been able to do without one notion or another of a certain minimal aesthetic distance, of the possibility of the positioning the cultural act outside the massive Being of capital, yet this distance is no longer achievable in the era of late capitalism.”48 He gives the example of the British punk-rock band The Clash as a group who explicitly call for political interventions but are “disarmed and reabsorbed” by the system of capitalism.49 Generation ‘П’ could easily serve as another example. Jameson does suggest an alternative: If nobody is capable of stepping outside the system of capitalism, then at least contemporary art can try to help its audience better understand their relation to the system. He calls this process “cognitive mapping,” explaining that its purpose is “to enable a situational representation on the part of the individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society’s structures as a whole.”50 This act of mapping can go wrong, though, and Jameson is particularly critical towards the mode of technological conspiracy theories, which “must be seen as a degraded attempt—through the figuration of advanced technology—to think the impossible totality of the contemporary world system.”51 Jameson explains that these conspiracy theories can be fictionalized accounts, as in the genre of cyberpunk, or genuine attempts to make sense of the modern world, but in both cases they misrepresent the organizing institutions and ideologies 47 Khagi, “From Homo Sovieticus to Homo Zapiens: Victor Pelevin’s Consumer Dystopia,” 573. 48 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 47. 49 Ibid., 48. 50 Ibid., 50. 51 Ibid., 37.

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of multinational capital by replacing them with distorted, simplified analogies that hinder the ultimate goal of raising class-consciousness. Fran Mason, however, points to the problem of differentiating what Jameson considers good cognitive mapping from this degraded form. He claims that cognitive mapping “depends on a stable self who can process the mass of information and simulacra made available in late capital,” and that this form of subjectivity requires the same critical distance between the individual and the system that Jameson claims is no longer possible.52 He goes on to analyze how conspiracy theories attempt to create this necessary distance and the inherent difficulties made apparent by this process, concluding that “conspiracy theory is less a ‘poor person’s cognitive mapping’ than a paradigm of ‘everyone’s cognitive mapping’ in its attempts to make sense of the confusions of subjectivity in a multinational global society.”53 Generation ‘П’ is, of course, structured around just the sort of technological conspiracy theory that Jameson dismisses, one that seems to offer the tantalizing hope of mapping the totality of modern Russian society. This inclination towards conspiracy narratives has not been at all uncommon in the postSoviet era, either. Eliot Borenstein argues in his book The Plot against Russia: Conspiracy and Fantasy after Socialism (2019) that the collapse of the Soviet Union led to the proliferation of national conspiracy theories that “reaffirm Russia’s role as the hero of history while emphasizing its status as the world’s victim or offended party,” often drawing on apocalyptic imagery and rhetoric in the process.54 It is not difficult to see how Generation ‘П’ fits this general model. Russia is tasked with preventing the apocalyptic return of the mythological dog Pizdets (a play on words that Andrew Bromfield translates as “Phukkup”), despite the West incessantly blocking the Institute’s frequency and thus making its job harder. But as Keith Livers points out, the central conspiracy regarding the Institute of Apiculture and Ishtar never actually provides the answers it promises: “The goddess, Ishtar, after all, is ultimately nothing more than the complex of images used in advertising, while the newly deified/digitized Tatarsky

52 Fran Mason, “A Poor Person’s Cognitive Mapping,” in Conspiracy Nation: The Politics of Paranoia in Postwar America, ed. Peter Knight (New York: New York Unversity Press, 2002), 47. 53 Ibid., 54. 54 Eliot Borenstein, Plots against Russia: Conspiracy and Fantasy after Socialism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019), 14.

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is no less a prisoner of the reality that ‘the medium is the message.’”55 Livers makes the case that the Institute is a parody of conspiracy discourse, using the generic themes and structures typical of such theories—the secret society with roots going back for centuries, just like the Illuminati, Masons, and others—as a way of drawing attention to the discontents of global capitalism these theories try but fail to grapple with. In this sense, Livers refers to Pelevin’s style as “post-paranoid,” since the goal is no longer to identify the secret power structures that control modern society, but rather to question whether anyone is truly in charge of the diffuse, invisible forces that shape modern life. This post-paranoid lens, according to Livers, destabilizes the foundations on which traditional conspiracy narratives attempt to map the underlying structure of society: “What does it mean to be a puppet-master if one is a puppet oneself vis-à-vis other equally powerful and anonymous forces? Can there be a conspiracy if all are participating in it?”56 The Institute of Apiculture ultimately finds itself shaped by the very media forces that it nominally controls, and even at the top of the hierarchy, Tatarsky is unable to see beyond the hyperreality of capitalist simulacra that it produces. There is, in short, no tower from which one can map out modern society from a distance, and any attempt to create that distance risks falling into familiar yet deeply flawed patterns of paranoid conspiracy. Pelevin goes on to further develop this parodic treatment of conspiracy discourse in his later novels. This is particularly apparent in Empire V (2006) and Batman Apollo (2013), both of which function as sequels to the plot of Generation ‘П’ and expand upon the conspiratorial framework supposedly regulating Russian society. In Empire V, we learn that the cult of Ishtar is merely an illusion propagated by a secret cabal of vampires who rule over humanity in order to extract a mysterious concentrate of human life-force known as “bablos.”57 Ishtar is revealed to be not a goddess, but rather a position held by various vampires over the course of history in a manner similar to the position of consort that Tatarsky achieves at the end of Generation ‘П’. Both roles even feature the same violent transition from one office holder to the next by way of ritualistic strangulation, a grim reminder that neither one is ever entirely 55 Keith Livers, “The Tower or the Labyrinth: Conspiracy, Occult, and Empire-Nostalgia in the Work of Viktor Pelevin and Aleksandr Prokhanov,” The Russian Review 69, no. 3 (2010): 484. 56 Keith Livers, Conspiracy Culture: Post-Soviet Paranoia and the Russian Imagination (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020), 56. 57 As Livers notes, “bablos” comes from the word bablo, a Russian slang term for money.

CHAPTER 5    “The Battle for Your Mind”

in control of the conspiracy apparatus that they are working within. By introducing vampire society as an even grander conspiracy that subsumes the plot of Generation ‘П’, Pelevin seems to keep promising the real truth just out of sight, the ever-higher vantage point from which one can finally see what is really going on. Batman Apollo follows the same trajectory, expanding on the organization and metaphysics of the vampire society which appears progressively more baroque and convoluted. At the same time, however, this constantly deferred desire to create an all-encompassing map of contemporary society is revealed to be endless: the underlying conspiratorial logic can always mutate and expand outwards, growing in scale and complexity without ever reaching the final truth that it intends to discover. In Livers’s analysis of the conspiratorial logic in Generation ‘П’ and Empire V, he concludes that Pelevin presents an irreducible plurality of languages which attempt to explain reality without allowing for a single correct answer. As a result of this confusion, we are left in an endless labyrinth in which everyone is equally lost. This epistemological confusion becomes literalized as an actual labyrinth in another one of Pelevin’s works, The Helmet of Horror (Shlem uzhasa, 2005). The novel’s plot, loosely adapted from the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, follows a group of characters who each wake up in separate rooms of a mysterious prison, and can only communicate with one another by way of a virtual chat-room. Outside of their rooms each character finds a labyrinth, but none of them see the exact same labyrinth: some labyrinths appear radically different from one character to another, while others are similar enough that the characters mistakenly assume they are describing the same space. In each case, however, it becomes clear that the characters of the novel are all seeing different realities which cannot be reduced down to a singular truth. The figure of the labyrinth, in this sense, serves as an inverse of the conspiracy theory: the latter attempts to map out social and political structures that shape reality without ever achieving a totalizing truth, while the former reveals the unresolvable ambiguity of any effort to describe objective reality at all. The parodic conspiracy in Generation ‘П’, as well as those presented in Empire V and Batman Apollo, thus repudiate the explanatory power of conspiracy narratives for making sense of the modern world. In doing so, they also cast doubt on the possibility of the “good” cognitive mapping Jameson describes. While Pelevin’s close engagement with critical theory throughout these works suggests that he is invested in demonstrating the effects of modern capitalism on Russian society, the goal of objectively mapping or coming to terms with

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capitalism’s underlying structures remains forever out of reach because there is no stable reality on which to base such a map.

Conclusion Returning once again to Tatarsky and his American marketing book, Positioning: A Battle for Your Mind, I would like to suggest a useful way of thinking about Pelevin’s attitude towards Western theory in light of the discussions here. Pelevin was undoubtedly influenced by some of these cultural theorists, but the novel does not unambiguously align itself one way or another, nor is he drawing exclusively on Western theory. Noordenbos, for example, argues that the novel also evokes certain theoretical notions of Moscow-Tartu school of semiotics, and Vicks similarly identifies Russian conceptualism as another important point of reference.58 The novel appears to draw on varied elements from this or that philosopher, and each element is incorporated into the plot as a motif, theme, or literal figure, amounting to a kind of theoretical bricolage. The effect is not too dissimilar from Tatarsky’s advertisements, which are made up of a similar grab bag of disparate sources, a blending of Russia and the West. Pelevin’s literalizing theoretical metaphors might even be self-consciously playing into this comparison given the way it emphasizes the surface-level positions of each theorist—Pelevin picking out the term “simulacrum” from Baudrillard’s philosophy in the same way Tatarsky picks up the phrase “line extention” from Positioning. Vicks reaches a similar conclusion, arguing that “by making literal postmodern metaphors, the novel winks at itself as a postmodern text and exhibits a hyperawareness of its postmodern themes, lending them an aura of an already-played out familiarity.”59 This self-aware irony, while certainly present in the novel, does not necessarily preclude the possibility that Pelevin is engaging with these theorists in good faith, interpreting and responding to the content of their arguments to a degree that is not present in Tatarsky’s surface-level reading of American marketing guides. Tatarsky, after all, is producing meaningless advertisements for the sole purpose of selling products. One may reasonably assume that Generation ‘П’ is written with some sort of higher goal in mind. But if Pelevin’s diagnosis of modern Russian society is to be believed, then perhaps the difference doesn’t mean all that much in the end.

58 Noordenbos, “Breaking into a New Era? A Cultural-Semiotic Reading of Viktor Pelevin,” 86; Vicks, Narratives of Nothing in 20th-Century Literature, 148–149. 59 Vicks, Narratives of Nothing in 20th-Century Literature, 148.

CHAPTER 6

Totalitarian Literature in Generation ‘∏’ MEGHAN VICKS, UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO, BOULDER

V

ictor Pelevin’s Generation ‘П’ (1999) is a novel about literature, as well as a novel with a complicated relationship to literature.1 On the one hand, Generation ‘П’ recounts the evolution of its hero Vavilen Tatarsky as he seemingly abandons literature: from a novice poet and translator; to a writer of advertisements and kompromat (“compromising material,” used to control or disgrace political opponents); and finally to the head of a secret society that controls television and hence the world. By the end, Tatarsky is an adman in the most literal, even corporeal, sense of the word. His sacred duty is to appear in advertisements, while his very existence becomes enmeshed with commercial media. On the other hand, Generation ‘П’ is highly intertextual, structuring its narrative world on literature itself.2 Sometimes the novel literalizes canonical

I would like to thank Sofya Khagi for inviting me to contribute to this project, and for her generous feedback on early drafts of the essay, which improved it greatly. 1 Andrew Bromfield translated the novel into English under the titles Homo Zapiens (US) and Babylon (UK). I use Bromfield’s translation, with my own translations as noted. Quotations are taken from the following editions: Victor Pelevin, Homo Zapiens, trans. Andrew Bromfield (New York: Penguin, 2006); Viktor Pelevin, Generation ‘П’ (Moscow: Eksmo, 2007). All textual references list the page number for Homo Zapiens first (HZ), followed by the page number for Generation ‘П’ (GP). 2 Intertextuality is a staple of Pelevin’s works: “Pelevin’s intertexts are neither a straightforward homage nor an obvious parody but an imaginative and often paradoxical rethinking.

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titles. Other times it shows literature marketing commercial goods, transforming Russian literature’s traditional role of answering “What is to be done?” into answering “What is to be purchased?”3 Additionally, the novel is peppered with literary allusions. While these often decenter literature or void its meaning, they nevertheless depend on an audience who is well read (and therefore likely values literature) to be impactful. Thus, in a novel about the transformation of the would-be litterateur into an adman, we witness the concurrent decline of literature-centrism and rise of commercial media in post-Soviet Russian culture, and the ironic structuring of this culture on the literary institutions it rejects. The question therefore arises: what does Pelevin ultimately say about literature in Generation ‘П’? This question is complicated by extratextual factors—that is, by the novel’s engagement with actual entities beyond the written text, including its author, marketing plan, and the cultural milieu in which it was written. Beginning with the first of these, Pelevin bestows upon his hero details from his own life. Like Pelevin, Tatarsky studies electromechanical engineering and then enrolls in the Literary Institute. Tatarsky’s writing adopts “Pelevin’s signature style, which mixes the widest possible range of cultural languages and liberally employs puns, paradoxes, and aphorisms.”4 Moreover, when not yet able to make a living by writing literature, Pelevin “worked as an advertising writer for, among others, the Russian cigarette company Yava Zolotaya, a brand that figures in the novel.”5 Parallels like these encourage the reader to interpret Tatarsky’s journey from wannabe poet to literal adman as implying that the author himself has undergone a similar trajectory. This interpretation is enriched by the publisher Vagrius’s release of the novel in “high” and “low” editions the year it came out. The former was designed to appeal to “highbrow” readers, and the latter to “mass market” readers— thereby augmenting the novel’s overall potential audience or “ratings.”6 He considers classic notions from unexpected angles, provides twists on familiar themes, and reworks them in ways that enrich his own vision.” Sofya Khagi, Pelevin and Unfreedom: Poetics, Politics, Metaphysics (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2021), 161. 3 What is to Be Done? (Chto delat'?) is the name of Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s (in)famous 1863 novel. Its title poses what became a burning question for the Russian intelligentsia. 4 Sofya Khagi, “From Homo Sovieticus to Homo Zapiens: Viktor Pelevin’s Consumer Dystopia,” The Russian Review 67 (October 2008): 571. 5 Birgitte Beck Pristed, The New Russian Book: A Graphic Cultural History (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 183. 6 See Pristed, The New Russian Book, 181–214, for an analysis of the novel’s marketing and covers (26+) over time.

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Even the orthography of the novel’s title was altered to attract different target groups: “The letter “Π” in standard quotation marks in the high-cultural edition becomes ,П‘ in the mass-market edition, referencing the obscene term pizdets (written with two commas, as the novel indicates), which stands for the apocalypse.”7 If the author presents himself as an adman, and the novel as a consumer good, then the reader becomes the consumer. Generation ‘П’ thus includes itself in its critique of the decline of literature and rise of consumer culture; any criticism it levels at this situation is also a criticism aimed at its own author, reader, and the novel itself.8 And yet, by writing literature doesn’t Pelevin undermine these implications? Does the use of literature as the medium through which to showcase its decline reaffirm literature’s value? Or is it possible to write antiliterature, literature so cynical that it discredits itself, halfheartedly getting off on its own skepticism?9 Further complicating the question is the novel’s setting in a time and place—post-Soviet Russia—itself engaged in a debate about literature. As Evgeny Dobrenko and Mark Lipovetsky explain, “The 1990s precipitated a complete reshaping of the entire literary field and of the overall notions about the literary canon: what should be considered good literature, what traditions to hold on to, and which ones to reject. The question as to whether the age of Russian literature-centrism had come to a close was hotly debated.”10 I offer here an interpretation that reads Generation ‘П’ not only as an extended portrayal of this debate, but also as a controversial answer to it. It is not that literature-centrism has ended, or that literature has been replaced with consumerism. Rather, the implicit project of literature-centrism is absolutely fulfilled. If historically literature, and by proxy the intelligentsia, strove to direct  7 Khagi, Pelevin and Unfreedom, 190. ­  8 For more on how Pelevin’s works critique their own author, see Sofya Khagi, “Incarceration, Alibi, Escape? Viktor Pelevin’s Art of Irony,” Russian Literature 76, no. 4 (November 2014): 381–406. “Perceiving existence as a cosmic joke,” Khagi writes, “[Pelevin] recognizes himself to be the foremost object of that joke” (382). Generation ‘П’ “both lays open the ills of consumerism and advertises itself as an offspring of consumer society” (389).  9 Generation ‘П’ is not the first of Pelevin’s novels to tackle these issues: “Chapaev and the Void, the novel that made Pelevin a brand, is where he begins foregrounding the problem of ironizing the post-Soviet book market, society, and way of life, all the while prominently participating in and conditioned by these himself.” Khagi, Pelevin and Unfreedom, 184. 10 Evgeny Dobrenko and Mark Lipovetsky, “The Burden of Freedom: Russian Literature after Communism,” in Russian Literature since 1991, ed. Evgeny Dobrenko and Mark Lipovetsky (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 3.

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Russian society, then in the novel this is achieved in a total (or totalitarian) way. Pelevin further examines the totalitarian potential of literature and philosophical discourse in his works published in the two decades since Generation ‘П’.

Scholarly Approaches to Literature in Generation ‘∏’ Many scholars read Generation ‘П’ as a novel about discourse, language, and literature in post-Soviet Russia. Lipovetsky classifies Generation ‘П’ as a “mythnovel” that unfolds upon “three levels that mutually undermine each other.”11 These include a fairytale-mythological “quest” Tatarsky undertakes to become a “living god”; an “adventure-production novel” wherein “copywriters, in composing advertising clips, produce myths upon which they themselves become dependent”;12 and two meta-commentaries (one by Che Guevara, and the other by Sirruf) that reveal the post-Soviet identification with television and money. “All three of these mythological structures,” argues Lipovetsky, “are organized around an empty center.”13 If we recall Northrop Frye’s formulation that literature derives from myth “its central structural principles,”14 then the novel’s deconstruction of myths signals a similar approach to literature. Roman Ivashkiv reads Generation ‘П’ as a transmetic novel. For him, Tatarsky is primarily a translator, and the novel is fundamentally about translation: In its portrayal of the process of localization . . . and by repeatedly “performing” translation in footnotes and parenthetical explanations, Generation ‘P’ wrestles with cultural and linguistic untranslatability, problematizes the relationship between translation and original, and reiterates the profoundly intertextual, playful, and creative nature of any process of translation.15

The issue of translation is heightened by the novel’s use of puns, many of which are “transmetic (i.e. premised on the portrayal of translation),” multilingual, 11 Mark Lipovetskii, Paralogii: Transformatsii (post)modernistskogo diskursa v russkoi kul'ture 1920–2000-x godov (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2008), 430. Translations from this text are my own. 12 Ibid., 431. 13 Ibid., 432. 14 Northrop Frye, Words with Power: Being a Second Study of “The Bible and Literature” (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), xiii. 15 Roman Ivashkiv, “Transmesis in Viktor Pelevin’s Generation ‘P’ and Andrew Bromfield’s English Translation,” Translation Studies 11, no. 2 (2018): 202.

CHAPTER 6    Totalitarian Literature in Generation ‘∏’

and intertextual.16 While the puns complicate the translator’s task (as Pelevin himself has mentioned),17 they also reassert the novel’s focus on language and the problem of conveying meaning. In Generation ‘П’ translation emerges as work that must be continuously performed to survive in the post-Soviet world. This world therefore arises as an opaque literary text Tatarsky must endlessly translate, but which he fails to understand. That Tatarsky can come into ultimate power by translating without understanding fuels a cynical view of literature and language in post-Soviet Russia. On extratextual and paratextual levels, the novel’s publication history tracks the rise of independent book publishing in post-Soviet Russia, and the subsequent fossilization of this industry into publishing monoliths more interested in reprinting bestselling titles under new covers than in developing unestablished authors.18 Meanwhile, on a metafictional level, the novel “interrogates the status of the literary tradition with which it is allied in the face of the threat to it posed by the commodified camera image.”19 In Generation ‘П’, which “resembles a televisual anti-novel, interrupted by commercial breaks,” Pelevin “enacts the end of literature.”20 Of these approaches, Lyudmila Parts’s “Degradation of the Word” merits sustained attention. She argues that Tatarsky represents the Russian intelligentsia and its degradation in post-Soviet culture.21 Parts views the intelligentsia in terms of its “mythic dimension”—“the way in which it is socially and culturally constructed”—rather than in terms of class structure or ideology.22 The myth of “Great Russian Literature” is central to the intelligentsia’s selfconceptualization. This literature, “the repository of aesthetic and moral riches, . . . helps the intelligentsia to justify its perceived position of spiritual leadership.”23 As with the Revolution of 1917, the USSR’s collapse sparked 16 Roman Ivashkiv, “(Un)translatability Revisited: Transmetic and Intertextual Puns in Viktor Pelevin’s Generation ‘P’ and its Translations,” European Journal of Humour Research 7, no. 1 (2019): 114. 17 Viktor Pelevin, “Istoriia Rossii—eto prosto istoriia mody,” interview, Gazeta.ru, September 2, 2003, https://www.gazeta.ru/2003/09/02/viktorpelevi.shtml. 18 Pristed, The New Russian Book, 181–214. 19 Stephen Hutchings, Russian Literary Culture in the Camera Age: The Word as Image (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004), 175. 20 Ibid., 177. 21 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 (September–December 2005): 435–449. 22 Ibid., 436. 23 Ibid., 438.

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debates regarding the intelligentsia’s culpability in effecting the cultural upheaval, and whether it still had a role to play in post-Soviet culture. Parts argues Generation ‘П’ “represents the changes in the self-image, social role, and relationship to culture of a typical Soviet intelligent in the postSoviet era.”24 Tatarsky is this typical Soviet intelligent, and the path he takes from intelligent to copywriter (kopiraiter) signifies the concurrent degradation of the word and its keeper. Finally, Parts floats the notion that despite the degradation of the intelligentsia in the sense that it no longer believes in Great Russian Literature, Tatarsky eventually occupies the highest position of power, becoming the head of an organization that creates and controls reality through television. “The old spiritual leadership,” Parts concludes, “now exercises total and totalitarian control. In this perverted sense, the intelligentsia is still leading the masses although its name might once again require a new definition.”25 My analysis develops this provocative thought.

Vavilen Tatarsky: Literature Symbolized The first chapter establishes Tatarsky as a symbol of traditional Russian literature, literature-centrism, and logocentrism.26 That is, Tatarsky is not a roundly developed character, but instead embodies the myth of Russian literature in a stereotypical and exaggerated manner—particularly, Russian literature’s association with eternity, as well as its dependence upon an authoritarian state. His narrative arc is therefore analogous to literature’s trajectory in post-Soviet Russia. This symbolism is established in the first chapter, which can be roughly divided as follows: the description of Tatarsky’s name; his dream of writing poetry for eternity; and his subsequent disillusionment in eternity and apparent farewell to literature following the USSR’s collapse. Tatarsky’s name “Vavilen” is the first and only substantial information given to introduce this character and establish his “personality.” His name imbues him with a literary (as opposed to a biological or familial) genealogy. Dreamt up by Tatarsky’s father, “Vavilen” is a portmanteau of the novelist Vasily Aksyonov (1932–2009) and the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin 24 Ibid., 441. 25 Ibid., 449. 26 Literature-centrism and logocentrism are not synonyms, despite the ways they relate. While Russian literature-centrism is a quasi-religious, mystical ideology, logocentrism is based in reason, in a Platonic epistemological system that privileges logos as superior to the objects represented. See Lipovetskii, Paralogii, 24–33.

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(1870–1924).27 Aksyonov was a writer associated with the youth prose trend in the de-Stalinization era during the 1950s–60s. This trend emphasized the young person’s self-discovery while rejecting—often only ostensibly—the trappings of their parents’ generation: They and their literary creations dressed in jeans and sneakers, danced rock-and-roll, flaunted their reading of Sartre, Hemmingway and Salinger, and spoke a language full of smart westernisms. . . . All the same, there is a sense in which “youth prose,” at least during the Khrushchev period, never quite emancipated itself from the ideas of the older generation. . . . Aksyonov’s heroes might renew themselves in the Baltic provinces, where they could pick up the latest western fashions and ideas, but they finished by heading for Siberia and honest labor on the virgin lands.28

Tatarsky likewise speaks a Westernized language and embraces Western culture. He and his cohort abandon the ideals of the Soviet world as they first survive then thrive in a post-Soviet one. But this abandonment, as I argue in this essay, is merely an apparent one. Tatarsky’s partial namesake “Vasily Aksyonov” bequeaths to him a typical literary plot of a youth making his way in a bewildering world only to reinstate the old one. This positions Tatarsky as a symbolically literary character—a figure generated and guided by literature. Moreover, the co-namesake “Vladimir Lenin” bestows upon Tatarsky a totalitarian nature, which is fully realized by the novel’s end. The first sign of literature’s coupling with totalitarianism thus appears in the name “Vavilen.”29

27 In his translation, Andrew Bromfield changes Vavilen’s name to “Babylen,” and replaces Vasily Aksyonov with “Yevtushenko’s famous poem ‘Baby Yar’” (2). These changes enable the sonic resonance between the name “Babylen” and the English pronunciation of “Babylon” (in Russian, Babylon is pronounced Vavilon). 28 Geoffrey Hosking, “The Twentieth Century: In Search of New Ways, 1953–80,” in The Cambridge History of Russian Literature, ed. Charles A. Moser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 552–553. 29 Furthermore, “Tatarsky” is a “significant name, given the Russian history of the Tatar yoke.” Gregory Freidin, “Dzheneraishen ‘P’,” Foreign Policy, no. 118 (Spring 2000): 166.

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Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Tower of Babel (1563).

The name’s connection to Babylon and Babel further unites literature and language with totalitarianism. Embarrassed by it, Tatarsky fabricates a new origin story for “Vavilen”: his father was “thinking of the ancient city of Babylon, the secret lore of which was destined to be inherited by him, Babylen.”30 This also associates Tatarsky with the Tower of Babel myth, recounted in Genesis 11:1–9, which begins, “Now the whole world had one language and a common speech.” Totalitarian language is central here: The Tower of Babel is the prototype totalitarian form. It is a construction based on Apollonian logocentrism, built by one people united under a tyrant-king, of one tongue and the same speech. . . . The Tower of Babel stands for the archetype of the fascist form that collective life tends toward under the singular rule of Apollonian logocentrism: ein logos, ein langue, ein Volk. God’s political intervention is the Dionysian scattering, the confusion of tongues.31 30 HZ, 2; GP, 12. 31 Kieran Keohane, “On the Political in the Wake: Carl Schmitt and James Joyce’s Political Theologies,” Cultural Politics 7, no. 2 ( July 2011): 261–262.

CHAPTER 6    Totalitarian Literature in Generation ‘∏’

Tatarsky’s name thus connotes a myth that partners logocentrism with totalitarianism—a myth resurrected at the novel’s end when Moscow is conceived as a new Babylon with Tatarsky its authoritarian leader (the one who indeed inherited its “secret lore”), selected primarily for his name’s association with the ancient city.32 The Tower of Babel myth also evokes the divinity of linguistic disruption. Linguistic disruption manifests in the very word “Babylon,” which has been related to “Babel” meaning “confusion of tongues.” This disruption is reinforced by these words’ murky, perhaps falsified, etymology.33 A similar linguistic confusion happens in the name “Vavilen,” which combines discourses from opposing ideological systems, and is given a falsified etymology that becomes true when Tatarsky’s candidacy as the goddess’s new husband is legitimized by his name’s affiliation with Babylon. Here, linguistic disruption may be associated with literature-centrism: Tatarsky creates a fictional, literary narrative about his name that becomes true, and that institutes his divine authority to create and control the world. Pelevin continues to characterize Tatarsky in clichéd “portrait of an artist” terms. Tatarsky’s life follows “an entirely ordinary pattern”34 until, when twenty-one years old, he reads poems by Boris Pasternak—an event that “changed the course of his life forever,” or more literally, “decided his fate.”35 These poems had such a profound impact that for several weeks he could think of 32 Babylon also “stands for the future kingdom of the Antichrist in the biblical book of Revelation. Post-Soviet Moscow, formerly called the ‘Third Rome,’ has become the whore of Babylon. It is destined for destruction due to its dismissal of all values beyond the material sphere. . . . Both Tatarsky’s first and last names carry demonic associations. The last name plays with Tartarus (hell).” Khagi, Pelevin and Unfreedom, 112, 114. 33 “Babylon is the rendering of Akkadian Babilum (Babilim), the city that for centuries served as capital of the ‘land of Babylon’ ( Jer. 50.28). Cuneiform sources interpret its name as bābilim, ‘gate of the deity.’ The Bible rejected this popular etymology in favor of a more scurrilous one that linked the name to the confusion of tongues (Gen. 11.9. Hebr. bālal, ‘[God] confused’), and so the city is called Babel.” William W. Hallo, “Babylon,” in The Oxford Companion to the Bible, ed. Bruce M. Metzger and Michael D. Coogan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). “Babel is the Hebrew word for Babylon, which the Babylonians themselves explained as meaning ‘gate of God.’ This etymology is probably not original, but the meaning is significant for a famous city whose central temple tower was said to reach the heavens (Gen. 11.4). In Genesis 11.9 the meaning of Babel is explained by the Hebrew verb bālal, ‘to confuse, mix,’ and the confusion of speech.” David G. Burke, “Babel, Tower of,” ibid. 34 HZ, 2; GP, 13. 35 HZ, 3; GP, 13.

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Part Three    Simulation and Mind Control nothing else—and then he began writing verse himself. . . . In short, his was an absolutely typical case, which ended in typical fashion when Tatarsky entered the Literary Institute. He couldn’t get into the poetry department, though, and had to content himself with translations from the languages of the peoples of the USSR. Tatarsky pictured his future approximately as follows: during the day—an empty lecture hall in the Literary Institute, a word-for-word translation from the Uzbek or the Kirghiz that had to be set in rhyme by the next deadline; in the evenings—his creative labors for eternity.36

The “typicality” of Tatarsky’s infatuation with literature is noted twice. A budding poet, Tatarsky plods a well-known path, guided by a stock narrative. His settling for the translation, rather than the poetry, department is ironized later when Tatarsky, instead of translating texts from the languages of the USSR, translates Western adverts for a Russian consumer. Finally, the link between poetry (literature) and eternity is introduced here. Eternal literature is a hallmark of Russian literature-centrism—the idea that literature developed as a sacred magical-mystical institution in Russia,37 ultimately reaching a quasireligious status to manifest “the presence of a transcendental center—Truth, Meaning, Light, Spirituality, etc.”38 After the USSR’s collapse, Tatarsky discovers eternity has also disappeared. This leads to an uncomfortable insight about eternal literature: “eternity only existed for as long as Tatarsky sincerely believed in it, and was actually nowhere to be found beyond the bounds of this belief. . . . [H]e realized something else too: the eternity he used to believe in could only exist on state subsidies, or else—which is just the same thing—as something forbidden by the state.”39 This suggests that eternity was, paradoxically, nurtured by an authoritarian state—and that “Russian logos, in particular, derived much of its moral force . . . from opposing the ignominy of the state.”40 Here, Pelevin evokes 1990s debates concerning Russian literature’s status and literature-centrism. According to Dobrenko and Lipovetsky, In this period, for the first time since the end of the eighteenth 36 HZ, 3; GP, 13. 37 Lipovetskii, Paralogii, 30. 38 Ibid., 32–33. 39 HZ, 4–5; GP, 14–16. 40 Khagi, Pelevin and Unfreedom, 36.

CHAPTER 6    Totalitarian Literature in Generation ‘∏’ century, there was a severe decline in the status of literature as an institution, which had ceased to play its traditional role as a political tribune. . . . Strange as it might seem, it was precisely the abolition of political censorship that brought the issues of literature per se into the foreground: after all, in the Perestroika years it was primarily the political acuity of a literary work, substantiated by the censors’ prohibitions, that had served as the truest criterion of artistic merit. And when the censors’ prohibitions disappeared, then the problem of artistic value, as well as the conceptions of what literature really is, had to be reconsidered.41

If literature’s relevance requires a relationship with the authoritarian or totalitarian state, or if literature secures its eternity—its transcendent meaning—in opposition to tyrannical power, then perhaps there is something fundamentally dictatorial about literature thus conceptualized. After all, if literature-centrism disappears in the absence of totalitarianism or authoritarianism, or if literature’s relevance declines as the state becomes more democratic, then literature ontologically requires that which it opposes. This totalitarian potential of literature is explored in Generation ‘П’ and, I argue, comes to fruition by its end. After realizing eternity has disappeared, Tatarsky forswears writing poems, since “with the collapse of Soviet power they had simply lost their meaning and value.”42 This reiterates the idea that whatever truth literature offered was made possible through its opposition to the state. Ironically, he renounces poetry and bids eternity farewell by composing one final poem.43 Like his name, this poem unites different “discourses”: Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (Prestuplenie i nakazanie, 1866);44 a song by the Russian rock band DDT, “What is Autumn” (“Chto takoe osen',” 1992); and Tatarsky’s recent memory of a salesgirl he dubs “Man'ka,” associated with dust-covered, tacky shoes that evoke the Soviet gestalt’s poshlost'. The last lines, which he formulated immediately after this event, were inspired by a song by the group DDT (“What is autumn—it’s 41 42 43 44

Dobrenko and Lipovetsky, “The Burden of Freedom,” 3–4. HZ, 5; GP, 16–17. This poem is left out of Bromfield’s translation. Dostoevsky is a multifaceted literary symbol in Pelevin’s works. See Khagi, “From Homo Sovieticus to Homo Zapiens,” 567–568; idem, Pelevin and Unfreedom, 161–181.

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The poem recalls the scene from Crime and Punishment where Raskolnikov meets Svidrigailov. After Raskolnikov declares he doesn’t believe in the afterlife, Svidrigailov muses, “We’re forever imagining eternity as an idea beyond our understanding, something vast, vast! But why must it be vast? Just imagine: what if, instead of all that, there’ll just be some little room, some sooty bath-hut, say, with spiders in every corner, and that’s it, that’s eternity?”46 Svidrigailov’s image of eternity eschews usual paradigms of everlasting bliss or torment, and instead offers everlasting boredom. Tatarsky’s poem first presents eternity via Svidrigailov’s vision of eternal boredom, and then downgrades it into something whose existence is doubted once an ordinary shop-girl forgets it. The poem therefore contends eternity is nonexistent, since the eternal—infinite and unending—is fundamentally not dependent upon transient and fickle human attention.47 The poem’s allusions to the DDT song deepen its commentary on eternity. While not strictly literature (it is, of course, a popular rock song), “What is Autumn” operates poetically. Tatarsky plays with this song both as a poetic intertext, and as a quintessential marker of the cultural milieu in which his poem is composed. DDT’s lead singer and songwriter, Yuri Shevchuk, wrote the song in September 1991 while walking in Saint Petersburg’s Nikolskoe Cemetery. The song’s origins are therefore intimately connected to what is perhaps the most stereotypical of times for contemplating Soviet eternity: about a month following the GKChP failed coup against Mikhail Gorbachev, during the month Leningrad was renamed Saint Petersburg, and a couple months prior to the USSR’s collapse. Placing the song within the novel’s setting, it was

45 English translation is my own. GP, 17. 46 Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, trans. Oliver Ready (New York: Penguin Books, 2015), 271. 47 As I show elsewhere, eternal nothingness becomes the essential condition of the post-Soviet world. Meghan Vicks, Narratives of Nothing in Twentieth-Century Literature (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 135–170.

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likely written around the time Tatarsky enrolled in the Literary Institute with dreams of writing poems for eternity. “What is Autumn” is, among other things, about facing the USSR’s potential end and what could happen afterward.48 Tatarsky lifts two major elements from the song’s lyrics. The most obvious is his line “What will become of the Motherland and of us?” (“Chto zhe budet s Rodinoi i s nami?”), which is taken directly from the song: “Autumn, will we be able to crawl to, fly to the answer/ What will become of the Motherland and of us?” (“Osen', dopolzem li, doletim li do otveta,/ Chto zhe budet s Rodinoi i s nami?”). In the song, autumn is addressed via apostrophe, as though she holds answers to existential questions concerning what’s in store for the country and her people. In Tatarsky’s poem, this question is posed not to a specific figure but instead more generally, perhaps to the reader. The significance of his poem’s unspecified addressee crystalizes when considering the other major element Tatarsky adapts from the song: the formula “What is autumn—it is . . .” In the song, this formula has three variants. The first: “What is autumn—it is the sky/heavens (nebo)”; the second, “it is stones (kamni)”; and the third, “it is the wind (veter).” With each variant, the permanence or eternity of the natural object representing autumn decreases—from the transcendence of the sky or heavens, to the longevity yet erodible nature of stones, to the transient comings and goings of the wind. Autumn’s eternity quotient diminishes throughout the song, an idea reaffirmed by the lines that immediately follow “What will become of the Motherland and of us?” These lines read: “Autumn, will we be able to crawl to, fly to the sunrise?/ Autumn, what will become of us tomorrow?” (“Osen', dopolzem li, doletim li do rassveta?/ Osen', chto zhe budet zavtra s nami?”). The existential question narrows in scope, allowing doubt that they’ll manage to make it to tomorrow’s sunrise. Eternity has tapered to the point where not even tomorrow is guaranteed. The song thus presents autumn as an oxymoronic diminishing eternity. With this in mind, we can develop what’s at stake when Tatarsky removes the addressee of the question “What will become of the Motherland and of us?” Where Shevchuk poses this question to autumn, Tatarsky poses it to no one in particular. This could, of course, be posed generally to the reader, and moreover the line “What will become of the Motherland and of us?” indicates 48 The song became such a superhit that Shevchuk and DDT refused to play it at concerts for a time, arguing that they didn’t want to become slaves to their creative art. The song consequently points to the phenomenon wherein the created becomes more powerful than the creator—a prevalent phenomenon in Generation ‘П’.

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Tatarsky (like Shevchuk) speaks to his fellow citizens. But analyzing the poem against the grain of Shevchuk’s lyrics insinuates that Tatarsky purposely erases the question’s addressee (autumn). Reading this erasure literally, the question is put to an eternity that has become nothing itself. And if Shevchuk treats autumn as a metaphor for eternity, Tatarsky makes this explicit when he writes “What is eternity” in place of “What is autumn.” There is another wrinkle to add to this analysis: when the narrator introduces Tatarsky’s poem, he says it was “inspired by a song by the group DDT (‘What is autumn—it’s foliage [list'ia] . . .’).” This amounts to a misquotation of the original lyrics, which do not include “it’s foliage” (“eto list'ia”) in response to “What is autumn.” There is, in the song’s final stanza, the lines “For as long as the leaves fall/ Autumn is eternally right” (“Skol'ko budet rvat'sia listva/Osen' vechno prava”), and perhaps the narrator picks up this listva (leaves, foliage), transforming it into list'ia. In any case, the distortion offers a literal, rather than metaphorical, answer to the query “What is autumn”—it’s leaves! But whose literalizing mistake is this: Tatarsky’s, the narrator’s, or even Pelevin’s? No matter the answer, the distortion is important for three reasons. First, it demonstrates that whatever eternal character autumn begins with in Shevchuk’s lyrics is changed into something quintessentially transient in the distorted quote: the fleeting reds, oranges, and yellows of dying leaves. Anything connected to eternity is deprived of that status in Tatarsky’s poem. Second, while it is no stretch to interpret the mistake as Tatarsky’s (as one of many details highlighting his ignorance), the inability to determine if the mistake (like others in the narrative) is Tatarsky’s, the narrator’s, or Pelevin’s emphasizes, once again, how the novel blurs lines between its characters and author, not exempting Pelevin from any critique it makes. Third, the misquotation heralds other distorted original sources in the narrative. This is seen, for example, when the phrase “From ship to ball” is attributed to Griboedov49 (it is actually from Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin [1825– 1832]);50 or when artworks by Goya, Picasso, and Velasquez are described that do not match up with known pieces by these artists.51 The poem therefore inaugurates a pattern wherein literature and art are built upon distortion, misunderstanding, or falsity. This is especially ironic in a literature-centric culture, which holds it is precisely literature and art that cut through falsity and clarify 49 HZ, 43; GP, 68. 50 For an analysis of this mistake, see Ivashkiv, “(Un)translatability Revisited,” 118–119. 51 Vicks, Narratives of Nothing, 145.

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what is true. Later, when I argue that the world Tatarsky helps build is indeed literary, the distortion of literary and cultural sources such as these indicates something’s literariness is not dependent on its veracity, but instead upon its perception as such—not unlike the false etymology of Tatarsky’s name that becomes “true” and establishes his power. Tatarsky’s final poem is a multi-layered statement on the decline of eternity and literature-centrism precipitated by the USSR’s collapse. And yet, as the poem bids farewell to literature and eternity, it assumes a sophisticated intertextual structure that derives its meaning from literature. It thus initiates a model that reappears throughout the novel in new institutions that fashion and rule the post-Soviet world.

From “What is to be done?” to “What is to be purchased?” After abandoning poetry and working in a kiosk for a year, Tatarsky develops “a cynicism as boundless as the view from the Ostankino television tower.”52 A connection is here established between cynicism and Russian television—a connection identified as a prominent feature of post-Soviet culture,53 and that reaches its zenith in the novel’s finale when Tatarsky is transformed into the equivalent of an ignorant god in a secret chamber underneath the tower. That it takes Tatarsky less than a year to go from writing poetry “for eternity” to boundless cynicism suggests that believer and cynic have something in common. Their kinship solidifies when Tatarsky begins writing scenarios for advertisements, and in so doing reignites his cherished values through the cynical pursuit of selling products he doesn’t value. For example, Tatarsky’s first scenario, commissioned for Lefortovsky Confectionery Combine, resurrects both the eternal and his poetic inspiration: It was a long time since he’d felt so inspired. . . . [The scenario] con52 HZ, 7; GP, 20. The Ostankino television tower is a symbolic place in the post-Soviet landscape. “The tradition of urban legend(s) surrounding the Ostankino tower is a particularly rich one, dating back to the mid-sixteenth century . . . [T]his tradition includes the perception of Ostankino as a latter-day Tower of Babel.” Keith Livers, “The Tower or the Labyrinth: Conspiracy, Occult, and Empire-Nostalgia in the Work of Viktor Pelevin and Aleksandr Prokhanov,” The Russian Review 69 ( July 2010): 488–489. 53 For overviews of the Kremlin’s use of television to propagate cynicism, see Michael Specter, “Kremlin, Inc.,” The New Yorker, January 21, 2007, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/01/29/kremlin-inc; and Peter Pomerantsev, “The Kremlin’s Information War,” Journal of Democracy 26, no. 4 (October 2015): 40–50.

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Part Three    Simulation and Mind Control sisted of a sequence of historical reminiscences and metaphors. The Tower of Babel rose and fell, the Nile flooded, Rome burned, ferocious Huns galloped in no particular direction across the steppes—and in the background the hands of an immense transparent clock spun round. “One generation passeth away and another generation cometh,” said a dull and demonic voice-over (Tatarsky actually wrote that in the scenario), “but the Earth abideth forever.” But eventually even the earth with its ruins of empires and civilizations sank from sight into a lead-colored ocean; only a single rock remained projecting above its raging surface, its form somehow echoing the form of the Tower of Babel that the scenario began with. The camera zoomed in on the cliff, and there carved in stone was a bun and the letters “LCC,” and beneath them a motto that Tatarsky had found in a book called Inspired Latin Sayings:

MEDIIS TEMPESTATIBUS PLACIDUS. CALM IN THE MIDST OF STORMS. LEFORTOVSKY CONFECTIONERY COMBINE54

In contrast to his “boundless cynicism,” Tatarsky’s work is “inspired”; he experiences something related to his earlier attempts at poetry. The scenario’s first half juxtaposes what is transitory—from human endeavors like language (Tower of Babel) and war (ferocious Huns) to natural phenomena (the Nile’s floods)—and what is eternal (Earth). But it then replays Tatarsky’s disillusionment in the eternal by sinking Earth into the ocean. So far, the scenario only echoes the loss of eternal meaning. However, the scenario’s second half resurrects the eternal as a modern Tower of Babel: a rock monolith carved with the acronym and baked-bun emblem of Lefortovsky Confectionary Combine. This is certainly a depressing depiction of eternity, akin to a bathhouse with spiders. It satirizes what capitalism values—the company that withstands or “remains calm” throughout any storm—and worships the business authoritarian. But it also reinstitutes (1) the eternal, (2) a new form of commercial-logocentrism in the revamped Tower of Babel, and (3) Tatarsky’s poetic inspiration. A new species of literature arguably emerges. 54 HZ, 15; GP, 30–31.

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The invention of a new species of literature is conveyed through the novel’s advertisements that engage literature to sell commercial brands: Chekhov for Gap; Hamlet for Calvin Klein; Shakespeare’s The Tempest for Ariel; and Tyutchev for Smirnoff, among others.55 These exploit literary references to guide the consumer toward the correct answer to “What is to be done?,” refigured as “What is to be purchased?”56 A brilliant example is the novel’s first advertisement for Gap. Its central image is a pants-less Chekhov, his naked legs splayed to create the outline of a gap. Its text, given in English in capital letters, reads, “RUSSIA WAS ALWAYS NOTORIOUS FOR THE GAP BETWEEN CULTURE AND CIVILIZATION. NOW THERE IS NO MORE CULTURE. NO MORE CIVILIZATION. THE ONLY THING THAT REMAINS IS THE GAP. THE WAY THEY SEE YOU.”57 If “culture” is traditionally associated with the intelligentsia, then “civilization” implies the state (which the intelligentsia, in its self-mythologizing, opposed), or it implies society (which the intelligentsia, again in its self-mythologizing, was thought to guide). Both “culture” and “civilization” are gone, leaving only the gap that divided the two. Whereas before the intelligentsia used upper-case Logos (Chekhov) to mediate (straddle) the gap—to guide civilization—now all that remains is the space between, “materialized” in Gap and its lower-case commercial logos. But as the ad debases Chekhov by removing his pants (and bringing a symbol of Russian literary culture down to the lower-bodily stratum), Chekhov simultaneously establishes Gap’s power through association with him, consequently reaffirming his symbolic power. Great Russian literature is still guiding here, validating the cultural meaning and authority of Gap. Especially considering the economy of Chekhov’s prose, a pants-less Chekhov delightfully “lays bare” the Chekhovian 55 The replacement of “one’s own” (svoi) Soviet order with “alien” or “outsider” (chuzhoi) Western commodities is at the heart of Generation ‘П’, distinguishing the novel from perestroika-era dystopias that focus on dismantling the Soviet utopia. This aspect of the novel encourages critics to read it in conversation with postmodern theories on high capitalism, spectator and media culture, grand narratives, commodification, and techno-consumer systems of domination. Regarding Pelevin’s overall status as a “postmodern author” (as he is often classified), Khagi observes, “He is a consummate performer of postmodernism— and simultaneously its acute critic who posits the problem of individual liberation from a carceral society as an ethical imperative” (Pelevin and Unfreedom, 25). 56 Many of the novel’s more than thirty descriptions of commercials “[mock] actual existing Russian TV commercials of the 1990s.” Mark Lipovetsky, “Postmodernist Novel,” in Russian Literature since 1991, ed. Evgeny Dobrenko and Mark Lipovetsky (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 152. 57 HZ, 63; GP, 95.

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device of an economical “fashion.” A clever work of literary criticism, the ad explicates an essential element of Chekhov’s style, then makes this style synonymous with Gap to raise the brand’s value.

“A Cloud in Pants” A central chapter that develops the novel’s position toward literature is “A Cloud in Pants” (“Oblako v shtanakh”). Its title pays homage to Vladimir Mayakovsky’s poem “Oblako v shtanakh” (1914–1915), signaling immediately its preoccupation with literature. The chapter opens with Tatarsky writing internal reviews for three advertising scenarios. He condemns the literary elements of the first two. The scenario for Camay soap is “too literary” (“striving for a literary effect,” literaturshchina).58 The second scenario, created for Gucci, features literary critic Pavel Bisinsky,59 hungover in a fly-infested outhouse, and pontificating on Pushkin’s opinion regarding Russia’s Europeanness.60 Even when the floor breaks and Bisinsky falls into excrement, his logorrhea continues (having proceeded to Krylov and Chaadaev’s debate on the matter).61 Soon, however, Bisinsky’s oratory is abruptly stopped as he is jerked violently down. A voiceover announces (in English, then switching to Russian): “Gucci for men. Be a European. Smell Better” (“Gucci for men. Bud' evropeitsem. Pakhni luchshe”).62 Tatarsky approves this scenario, but requires the removal of all literary elements, explaining: “It’s time to have done with literary history and think about our real clientele.”63 Parts argues that “the real client, the target audience, is not the intelligentsia; otherwise, relying on the reference system associated with the literature common to this group would not be such a blunder.”64 But Tatarsky’s third review shows “literary history” has not taken its leave, and that the intelligentsia is still an important clientele. Tatarsky’s evaluation of the Yava cigarettes scenario embraces an offshoot of the debate regarding Russia’s Europeanness. Namely, he compliments the scenario’s potential to bring the intelligentsia closer to the Russian idea, arguing, “It suits the mood of 58 HZ, 159; GP, 229. 59 This figure is a hardly-disguised depiction of the critic Pavel Basinsky (1961–), who has expressed distaste for Pelevin’s works. 60 HZ, 159; GP, 230. 61 HZ, 160; GP, 230. 62 HZ, 160; GP, 231. 63 HZ, 160; GP, 231. 64 Parts, “Degradation of the Word,” 447.

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the broad masses of the lumpen intelligentsia, who are the primary consumers of these cigarettes.” Additionally, the scenario will provoke a positive “crystallization” in this consumer, who will “unconsciously believ[e] that every cigarette he smokes brings the planetary triumph of the Russian idea a little closer.”65 In these remarks Tatarsky transforms Marx’s lumpenproletariat into the “lumpen intelligentsia.” Whereas the lumpenproletariat is the underclass devoid of class-consciousness, the “lumpen intelligentsia” implies an intelligentsia lacking the Russian idea. Tatarsky’s praise thus discloses that the ad functions like a traditional Russian literary work, whose prerogative lies in conveying such grand ideas. Tatarsky’s three reviews—which showcase the rejection of literature, followed by the reaffirmation of literary concerns (such as the Russian idea)—set the stage for the revelation of a new kind of literature-centrism. While finishing up these reviews, Tatarsky is summoned by Morkovin, who says it’s time to see what else is happening at the Institute of Apiculture. The tour’s crown jewel is “President Yeltsin”—actually, a corporeal cloud bobok (“stiff ” in Bromfield’s translation),66 animated by data generated from a former Shakespearean actor, Arkasha Korzhakov, who now works as a “skeleton” (outfitted with sensors that record his movements). This bobok Yeltsin is, furthermore, scripted by creatives like Tatarsky. While the real Boris Yeltsin (1931–2007) was alive in 1999 when Pelevin published Generation ‘П’, in the novel Yeltsin has died, and the only existing Yeltsin is his cloud bobok: “How long has [Yeltsin] been . . . like this?” [Tatarsky asked]. “Since that time he danced in Rostov during the election campaign. When he fell off the stage. We had to get him coded double quick. Remember that by-pass operation he had? There were no end of problems. By the time they finished digitizing him, he stank so bad that everyone was working in respirators.”67

Morkovin discloses that the real Yeltsin’s 1996 bypass surgery was a cover up: Yeltsin accidentally killed himself when he fell off the stage in Rostov, whereupon they digitized a bobok from his decomposing corpse.

65 HZ, 160–161; GP, 231–232. 66 HZ, 165; GP, 237. 67 HZ, 170; GP, 244.

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President Boris Yeltsin (left) with President Bill Clinton (center) laughing at a joke during a press conference. Washington, D.C., October 24, 1995. Image courtesy of www.kremlin.ru.

Three literary antecedents unite in Yeltsin’s bobok: Dostoevsky’s “Bobok” (1873); Mayakovsky’s “A Cloud in Pants”; and the Shakespearean theatrical tradition. This scene is also scored with other minor literary and artistic associations. The space where the “skeleton” Arkasha works resembles “the studio of a conceptual artist,”68 and his movements remind Tatarsky of the “stately grandeur and majestic pomp” of Stanislavsky’s system until he realizes they are merely the dramatic clumsiness of a drunk.69 The literary genealogy of Yeltsin’s bobok—together with the fact that this bobok is the only Yeltsin that exists and serves as president—demonstrates that literature is in power, even though this is literature generated through new media (corporeal clouds, computers, television, and so forth). This idea is underscored by the circumstance that all the powerful people—heads of state, politicians, oligarchs—are likewise bobki, or corporeal clouds in trousers. This new class of bobki leaders is scripted by former members of the Literary Institute who are also members of the new People’s Will. Their “activism” amounts to creating a false reality: they circulate rumors among the public that they’ve seen these virtual leaders “in real life” (that is, not on television), thereby strengthening the verisimilitude of the bobki characters they’ve created.70 68 HZ, 167; GP, 240. 69 HZ, 169; GP, 243. 70 Tatarsky is chased by one member of the People’s Will who was “the philosophy lecturer from the Literary Institute” (HZ, 219; GP, 309).

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It is worth the effort to analyze how Dostoevsky’s short story and Mayakovsky’s poem function in this context. The narrator of “Bobok” is a failed writer who makes his living translating French works and writing advertisements. He is disillusioned with the people of Russian society, who he views as uncultured, but he himself is rarely sober. Having begun to hear a seemingly hallucinatory sound—an unintelligible and interminable bobok—he seeks distraction and attends a distant relative’s funeral. Alone in the cemetery, he overhears the banal, cynical, and licentious talk of the dead, who continue to live as human consciousnesses while decaying. The closer they get to complete decomposition, the more their consciousness wanes. One of the dead, almost completely decomposed, every six weeks or so “suddenly mutters some little word, a meaningless one, of course, about some bobok: ‘Bobok, bobok’— which means that in him, too, an imperceptible spark of life is still glimmering.”71 As the dead agree to share stories “in the most shameless truth,”72 the narrator sneezes and they grow silent. He assumes they have some secret the living cannot know, and is further appalled by their depravity even in the twilight of consciousness. In closing, he announces his intent to submit an account of this occurrence to The Citizen. The reader understands that this intent has been fulfilled, as “Bobok” was first published in Dostoevsky’s Diary of a Writer column in the newspaper Grazhdanin (Citizen).

Svetlana Gennadievna Illarionova, Illustration of the short story “Bobok” by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

71 Fyodor Dostoevsky, “Bobok,” in The Eternal Husband and Other Stories, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Modern Library, 2012), 246. 72 Ibid., 247.

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If in Dostoevsky’s story bobok is a nonsensical word that nevertheless signals the glimmering of “an imperceptible spark of life,” then Pelevin inverts the hierarchy in Generation ‘П’, asserting the dummy bobok’s power over life. Bobok is no longer a mere word suggesting life but a scripted, computer-generated, puppeteered being that actually replaces the life of its signified, and moreover affects and even reigns over the lives of its living creators. Whereas for Dostoevsky bobok is the final utterance of human consciousness, for Pelevin bobok is the de-mancipated reincarnation of human life—not only life after death (as with Yeltsin), but also life during life. The latter becomes particularly evident when Tatarsky, too, is digitized, and his own bobok becomes ubiquitous on television while he serves as its regent. There are also parallels between the narrator of “Bobok” and Tatarsky. Both are, after all, infrequently sober failed writers who translate and write advertisements to get by. But whereas Dostoevsky’s narrator ostensibly writes his report in part to warn against the depravity he witnessed, so that one’s final moment of consciousness may be more meaningful than a senseless bobok, Tatarsky joins the animated bobok class in the end. In Tatarsky Pelevin merges opposing aspects from Dostoevsky’s story: the intelligent narrator and the unintelligible bobok. This is another way Generation ‘П’ intimates that the literary class in post-Soviet Russia is fully aligned with that which it traditionally opposed. Tatarsky and Mayakovsky (as the speaker of “A Cloud in Pants”) are also a mirrored pair, sharing essential traits but functioning as one another’s inverse. Like his fellow futurists, Mayakovsky declared his rejection of “Great Russian Literature” and yet was “vitally tied to the Russian literary tradition.”73 This, as discussed, is a quintessential formula in Generation ‘П’. Secondly, as Roman Jacobson argues, Mayakovsky’s self-mythologizing presents a boundless poet whose “creative urge toward a transformed future” is opposed to byt (“everyday life”), “the stabilizing force of an immutable present, overlaid, as this present is, by a stagnating slime, which stifles life in its tight, hard mold.”74 And yet in this mythology, there is an “indissoluble combination of motifs . . . : revolution and the destruction of the poet. . . . The poet’s hungry ear captures the music of the future, but he is not destined to enter the Promised Land.”75 Tatarsky inversely personifies this mythology, as the prototypical poet whose name 73 Roman Jacobson, “On a Generation That Squandered Its Poets,” in Language in Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 284. 74 Ibid., 277. 75 Ibid., 279, 280.

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connotes revolution (Lenin), literature (Aksyonov), and Logos (Babylon/ Babel), who encounters the awful byt of the “frightening murky greyness in which the Soviet soul simply continued rotting until it collapsed inwards on itself,”76 and yet who—in stark contrast to Mayakovsky—is disinterested in revolution and perversely accomplishes the immortality of the poet (as I show in the next section). If Mayakovsky “embodied the lyrical urges of [his] generation”—those who “entered into the years of the Revolution not as unmolded clay but still not hardened, still capable of adapting to experience and change, still capable of taking a dynamic rather than a static view of [their] lives”77—then Tatarsky is the embodiment of his generation, one that embraces the so-called “change” of one brown liquid for another,78 of communism for consumerism. Written from the perspective of a jilted lover, “A Cloud in Pants” begins by criticizing sensitive drawing-room “poets” who cannot turn themselves inside out, like Mayakovsky can (“A sebia, kak ia, vyvernut' ne mozhete,/ chtoby byli odni sploshnye guby!”).79 This “turning oneself inside out” is what he offers them: If you wish, I shall rage on raw meat; or, as the sky changes its hue, if you wish, I shall grow irreproachably tender: not a man, but a cloud in trousers!80 76 HZ, 19; GP, 36. 77 Jacobson, “On a Generation,” 274. 78 At the novel’s end, Tatarsky orders the replacement of Pepsi with Coca-Cola. The history of the USSR’s relationship with the Pepsi-Cola company is an important backdrop in Generation ‘П’. A 1959 photograph of Nikita Khrushchev gingerly sipping a cup of Pepsi while talking with Richard Nixon became a marketing triumph for the company (newspapers reported that Khrushchev wanted to be “more sociable,” punning Pepsi’s slogan “Be sociable, have a Pepsi”). The advertisements described in the novel operate similarly, merging political and cultural figures with commercial products. In 1972 Pepsi landed a cola monopoly in the USSR, becoming “the first capitalistic product” available in the Soviet Union. Pepsi is therefore the forefather of Western products brought into Russia following the USSR’s collapse. See Anne Ewbank, “When the Soviet Union Paid Pepsi in Warships,” Atlas Obscura, January 12, 2018, https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/soviet-union-pepsi-ships; and Stuart Elliott, “Pepsi: Official Soda of the Cold War,” The New York Times, July 1, 2009, https:// mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/01/pepsi-official-soda-of-the-cold-war/. 79 Vladimir Mayakovsky, “Oblako v shtanakh,” in The Bedbug and Selected Poetry, ed. Patricia Blake, trans. Max Hayward and George Reavey (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1975), 60. 80 Ibid., 61.

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The poet promises to show the full range of emotions, from mad meaty rage to cloud tender softness. The latter is the line Pelevin literalizes in Generation ‘П’: “not a man, but a cloud in trousers.” This is exemplified through Yeltsin, who is no longer a man but a digitized cloud bobok stumbling over his trousers—a cloud through which (ex-)poets like Tatarsky can showcase any emotion they please. If the bobok’s rich literary genealogy fails to fully convince the reader that what is produced at the Institute of Apiculture is indeed a new kind of literature, then Morkovin’s assertion that their brand is literature should eliminate any doubt. Comparing the work of the Americans with that of the Russians, Morkovin argues that Americans lack soul and creativity, and that the Russians are far superior: “the best they can come up with is a blow job in the Oral Office . . . Nah, our scriptwriters are ten times as good. Just look what rounded characters they write. Yeltsin, Zyuganov, Lebed. As good as Chekhov. The Three Sisters. Anyone who says Russia has no brands of its own should have the words rammed down their throat.”81

“The Golden Room”: A New Golden Age of Russian Literature Toward the novel’s end, Tatarsky climbs the ziggurat a second time. In the uppermost chamber, he discovers a newspaper fragment featuring a television schedule, with the text, “0:00—The Golden Room.”82 The following chapter, titled “The Golden Room,” opens with a naked Tatarsky finding himself in a spacious chamber that recalls the inside of a television, with one wall reminiscent of a screen and the other three opaque: “there wasn’t a single window in the walls faced with yellow stone, but one of the walls reflected like a mirror.”83 Tatarsky recognizes the people in this space, having seen them “many times on television,”84 and soon learns they are a hundred meters underground “near the Ostankino pond,”85 associated with the Ostankino television tower.86 By the chapter’s end, the goddess selects Tatarsky to be her new husband, and he undergoes scanning to generate his “little cloud” bobok (“Snimem s tebia

81 82 83 84 85 86

HZ, 173; GP, 248–249. HZ, 228; GP, 322. HZ, 230; GP, 324. HZ, 230; GP, 324. HZ, 231; GP, 325. See note 52 above.

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oblachko”).87 His own “cloud in pants” is therefore born—a bobok more powerful than the original Tatarsky who serves as its regent, and who still futilely asks “Who actually controls all of this?”88 Given the setup of “The Golden Room” as a television program, the layout of the physical room with its one reflecting wall, its proximity to the Ostankino tower, and the familiar media people, it appears Tatarsky enters a world that is television in a very literal sense—as though he arrives in a giant television set, and then becomes the main character of the show being screened. This scripted televised world is the new species of literature-centrism, the manifestation of literature in its totalitarian state. Tatarsky, here, embodies eternity: he becomes the “living god” (albeit an ignorant one) of a totalitarian organization that not only controls the world, but scripts and films and programs it into being. The characters that populate this world are the new literary heroes, dreamed up by creatives as good as Chekhov. The dream of the Russian intelligentsia is thus fulfilled. If literary culture is traditionally the keeper of eternal truths opposing the tyrannical state’s falsities, and the intelligentsia’s prerogative is to guide the cultural spirit and correct the state, then in Generation ‘П’ exactly this is accomplished: the state has become the giant creative project of intelligents like Tatarsky. “The Golden Room” may also evoke Russian literature’s Golden Age, hinting that this new species of totalitarian literature is in fact a new Golden Age of literature made reality. This idea crystalizes in the novel’s finale, which takes a page from Nikolai Gogol’s “The Overcoat” (“Shinel',” 1842). In the concluding section of “The Overcoat,” after Akaky Akakievich’s death, the narrator comments: But who could have imagined that this was not all there was to tell about Akaky Akakievich, that he was destined for a few days to make his presence felt in the world after his death, as though to make up for his life having been unnoticed by anyone? But so it happened, and our little story unexpectedly finishes with a fantastic ending.89 87 HZ, 245; GP, 344. In Bromfield’s translation, he changes “little cloud” to “image”: “We’re going to scan in your image.” 88 HZ, 245; GP, 344. This is a recurring situation in Pelevin’s novels: the protagonist ostensibly reaches the top of a conspiratorial system that controls reality, but still cannot access knowledge regarding who or what (if anything) is actually in control. Compared to traditional dystopias, where the workings of the dictator are explicated (think: Zamyatin’s Benefactor), in Generation ‘П’ “no Grand Inquisitor reveals himself ” (Khagi, Pelevin and Unfreedom, 41). 89 Nikolai Gogol, “The Overcoat,” in The Complete Tales of Nikolai Gogol, vol. 2, ed. Leonard J. Kent (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 329–330.

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“The Overcoat” wraps up with summaries of the “rumors” (slukhi) about Akaky’s “corpse” (mertvets) or “apparition” (prividenie) that circulated throughout Petersburg. Pelevin ends Generation ‘П’ similarly, describing clips in which Tatarsky’s own 3-D double (3D-dubler)—his cloud bobok—appears. Even though Tatarsky is still alive, his bobok is fundamentally akin to an animated corpse or apparition. It is, after all, connected to the talkative dead via its association with Dostoevsky’s story, as well as to Yeltsin through whom the concept is introduced, and who “exists” as a bobok beyond the grave. Moreover, the final sentence of Generation ‘П’ stokes the motif of circulating rumors, cribbing Gogol’s skaz, an often ambiguous, improvisational narrative voice: “There were rumors that a version of this clip was made in which there were thirty Tatarskys walking along the road one after the other, but there doesn’t seem to be any way to determine whether or not that’s true.”90 In an oft-quoted statement traditionally attributed to Dostoevsky or Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé, it is asserted that Russian writers of the midnineteenth century and beyond “came out from Gogol’s ‘Overcoat.’” Hence, Pelevin ends Generation ‘П’ by evoking an ur-text of the Golden Age of Russian literature and literature-centrism, indicating that the new totalitarian world described in the novel is not an aberration from the literary tradition but a direct outcome of it.91

***

Generation ‘П’ thus offers a radical answer to questions that beset the Russian intelligentsia and its traditional conception of literature amidst the upheaval of the 1990s. Though sharing the cynicism and perhaps even despair of these questions, Pelevin turns the crisis from something that has been done to Russia, the intelligentsia, and literature into an indictment of these entities by showing how the USSR’s fall has in fact allowed the final triumph, rather than defeat, of the intelligentsia and its literature-centrism.92 In Generation ‘П’, all reality is 90 Bromfield moves this final sentence to the middle of the second-to-last paragraph in his translation. HZ, 250; GP, 351. 91 If Pelevin ends Generation ‘П’ with a nod to Gogol, then he does so again in the final pages of Empire V, where Rama’s lyrical address is reminiscent of the famous troika passage of Dead Souls (Mertvye dushi, 1842). See Khagi, Pelevin and Unfreedom, 187. 92 Khagi observes, “Like Zamyatin, Huxley, and Orwell, Pelevin contemplates the baneful effects of social and technological development on artistic creativity, but unlike them, he homes in on art’s subversion by kitsch” (Pelevin and Unfreedom, 40). Pelevin thus undermines the traditional dystopian paradigm wherein art has the power to subvert the state, to “save” or “free” the world from tyrannical power. In Generation ‘П’, “[a]rt is first co-opted

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now, at last, scripted and controlled by the intelligentsia in a totalitarianism of which the Soviet state or its Tsarist predecessor could only dream. Especially the finale’s borrowing from Gogol’s “The Overcoat” asserts this as the natural culmination of the storied Russian literary tradition.

Conclusion: The Problem of Literature beyond Generation ‘∏’ How does Pelevin approach the issue of literature in his other works, especially those written in the two decades since the publication of Generation ‘П’? Generation ‘П’ anchors thematic lines that crisscross Pelevin’s oeuvre, and features figures that reappear elsewhere in his works.93 Together these establish an interest in the problem of literature as integral to Pelevin’s entire project. The most obvious place to begin is with what critics dub the “sequel” to Generation ‘П’,94 Empire V/Ampir V: A Novella about a Real Superman (Empire V/Ampir V: Povest' o nastoiashchem sverkhcheloveke, 2006).95 Empire V, whose title evokes Alexander Prokhanov’s “fifth empire” project,96 and whose subtitle upgrades Boris Polevoi’s The Story of a Real Man (Povest' o nastoiashchem

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into the system and then dispensed with altogether” (ibid.). As I hopefully have shown, the situation may be read slightly differently: in Generation ‘П’, art is not dispensed with, but rather the ideology of literature-centrism is perversely fulfilled—laying bare literature’s own totalitarian potential “Tarkovsky’s mirror” appears in The Helmet of Horror: The Myth of Theseus and the Minotaur (Shlem uzhasa: Kreatiff o Tesee i Minotavre, 2005); the apocalyptic pizdets dog becomes the FSB werewolf in The Sacred Book of the Werewolf (Sviashchennaia kniga oborotnia, 2004); Ishtar returns in Empire V; and so on. See Livers, “The Tower or the Labyrinth,” 495; Khagi, Pelevin and Unfreedom, 193. Both Generation ‘П’ and Empire V are patterned like a bildungsroman, following the transformations of their respective protagonists from unremarkable members of their generation to controlling figures in the conspiratorial elite. Anthony Phillips has translated the novel into English under the title Empire V: The Prince of Hamlet. Quotations are taken from the following editions: Victor Pelevin, Empire V: The Prince of Hamlet, trans. Anthony Phillips (London: Gollancz, 2016); Viktor Pelevin, Empire V/Ampir V: Povest' o nastoiashchem sverkhcheloveke (Moscow: Eksmo, 2006). “Alexander Prokhanov states that since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia has begun the path to recovery by rejecting liberal Western civilization. Prokhanov identifies three characteristics of this revival: Russia’s victory in the war against Georgia in 2008, which led to the recognition of the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia; the return of Crimea which, according to Prokhanov, marks the beginning of the Russians’ union; and, finally, the third sign—a Eurasian Union. [He] has written that the Eurasian Union would be Russia’s ‘fifth empire.’” Areg Galstyan, “Third Rome Rising: The Ideologues Calling for a New Russian Empire,” The National Interest, June 27, 2016, https://nationalinterest.org/ feature/third-rome-rising-the-ideologues-calling-new-russian-empire-16748.

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cheloveke, 1946),97 presents a post-Soviet Moscow secretly controlled by an elite vampire dictatorship. Vampires no longer suck blood, but instead imbibe bablos—the concentrated energy created by humans when in pursuit of money. Bablos is also connected to Babylon: “Bablos—does the word come from bablo, the Russian slang for money?” . . . “No,” [Ishtar] said. “Bablos is a really ancient word. It may be the very oldest which has come down to us. It has the same root as ‘Babylon,’ and that in turn comes from the Akkadian word ‘bab-ilu’ which means ‘the gates of God.’ Bablos is a sacred drink that turns vampires into gods. . . . Sometimes bablos is called ‘red liquid.’ But Enlil goes all scientific when he speaks of it: Aggregate ‘M-5,’ the ultimate condition of money. It’s condensed human life-force.”98

The vampires’ power rests upon their ability to host the Tongue (iazyk; “tongue” or “language”); their main disciplines are “glamour” (glamur) and “discourse” (diskurs), used to incite human desire for material and monetary wealth. Humans live oblivious to their entrapment within a “closed loop of desire,”99 their perceptions manipulated by “glamour” and “discourse” to motivate a relentless compulsion for money, thereby manifesting the life-force bablos that fuels the vampires’ existence. While the vampires are more advanced than humans, they are nevertheless cogs in a machine that perpetuates money. These concepts of “glamour,” “discourse,” “Tongue,” and “bablos” are parsed multiple times, and by different characters, throughout the novel. The recurring analysis of these ideas affirms their centrality to the new world order presented in Empire V, as well as a complexity that is, unfortunately, necessarily simplified in the gloss provided here. Still, what is evident is Pelevin’s enduring concern with the violence inherent in the literary and philosophical language of an elite (perhaps intelligentsia) class. In conversation with Alexander Etkind, Lipovetsky argues “the power of the vampires rests on expressly cultural foundations,” which positions them as the traditional Russian intelligentsia. Lipovetsky continues, “‘Discourse’ and ‘glamour’ are mechanisms of the symbolic violence on which the vampire’s power is based. Not coincidentally, even 97 Pelevin also plays with Polevoi’s The Story of a Real Man in Omon Ra (1992). 98 Empire V, 235 (English); 250–251 (Russian). See also note 33 above. 99 For an analysis of this “closed loop,” see Sally Dalton-Brown, “Illusion—Money—Illusion: Viktor Pelevin and the ‘Closed Loop’ of the Vampire Novel,” Slavonica 17, no. 1 (April 2011): 30–44.

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a renegade vampire teaches the young vampire Rama, the novel’s protagonist, that ‘A vampire should lead the discourse, not fall victim to it.’”100 By leading the discourse, control of humans happens covertly—a manipulation “more subtle and therefore more effective” than “governmental tyranny exercised through crude force” by a militant totalitarian state.101 As in Generation ‘П’, the intelligentsia and their language are integral to a social order more oppressive than the dictatorship of sovereign power. Moreover, human beings are the only species capable of producing bablos, namely because they are the only species that possesses Mind B (that is, the imagination). The faculty conventionally at the heart of artistic and spiritual production is precisely the one that enables the human subject’s enslavement.102 If Generation ‘П’ reveals the totalitarian potential of literature-centrism, then Empire V homes in on the totalitarian potential of discourse, which imprisons the human mind, annihilating its capacity for independent thought: Discourse acts in a manner not unlike an electric barbed-wire fence where the current touches not the human body but the human mind. It defines territory that cannot be penetrated from territory from which it is impossible to escape [that is, glamour]. . . . There is nowhere for the human being to escape to. Empty space holds nothing for him, yet he cannot pass through the Discourse barrier. The only thing left to him is to sleepwalk through the pastures of Glamour.103

The image of an electric barbed-wire fence drums up the association of twentieth-century concentration camps, such as Auschwitz-Birkenau. Discourse here is rendered in violent and totalitarian terms. Its ability to curtail and destroy individual thinking recalls Hannah Arendt’s thesis on totalitarianism, the banality of evil, and “thoughtlessness” or “inability to think” (Gedankenlosigkeit). In her report on the trial of the Nazi Otto Adolf Eichmann, a major architect of Hitler’s Final Solution to the Jewish Question, Arendt 100 Mark Lipovetsky and Alexander Etkind, “The Salamander’s Return: The Soviet Catastrophe and the Post-Soviet Novel,” Russian Studies in Literature 46, no. 4 (2010): 16. 101 Khagi, Pelevin and Unfreedom, 82. 102 This becomes a pattern in Pelevin’s work: qualities that make humans human—those associated with fantasy, the artistic impulse, the search for spirit or the divine—are precisely the ones that enable the fundamental unfreedom of humans. 103 Empire V, 84 (English); 92–93 (Russian).

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noted that Eichmann’s “inability to think” was a major culprit in his crimes; Eichmann worked “unthinkingly,” allowing in effect the institution of the state to think for him.104 Totalitarian structures attract populations that have recently experienced existential catastrophe and large-scale crisis of meaning, since the totalitarian ideology offers a grand narrative “key to history” that explicates the past and secures the path to the future. They therefore inspire “thoughtlessness,” and are in turn nurtured by it. A similar process is at work in Empire V, where the perception-shaping discourse of a vampire-intelligentsia disables humans’ capacity for individual thought.105 In a final turn of the screw, the fact that the Tongue (“language”) conditions this dictatorship points to the novel’s own “self-subversive logic”: “any claim, including its own, that language imprisons humans inside monetary simulacra can’t help being advanced from within language and so can’t help serving monetary simulacra.”106 The problem of literature and language also takes center stage in T (2009). Here, the soul of Lev Tolstoy is posthumously “resurrected” as a literary character (Count T) controlled by a demonic editor, Ariel Edmundovich Brakhmann. Count T’s narrative is scripted according to the formula for what sells best, by a writing team that includes a “metaphysician” with “Pelevinesque features.”107 Count T is an attractive young nobleman and martial arts practitioner with comic-book hero prowess. His quest to reach Optina Pustyn functions as product placement for the contemporary Russian Orthodox Church; “spirituality, like literature, has become a commodity to be marketed.”108 Eventually, Count T realizes he’s a character in a novel. This inspires philosophical inquiries 104 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin, 2006). Arendt’s concern with thinking itself is a constant presence in her work. For a discussion on the relationship between thinking and morality, see idem, “Thinking and Moral Considerations: A Lecture,” Social Research 38, no 3 (Autumn 1971): 417–446. Here she notes, “However monstrous [Eichmann’s] deeds were, the doer was neither monstrous nor demonic, and the only specific characteristic one could detect in his past as well as in his behavior during the trial and the preceding police examination was something entirely negative: it was not stupidity but a curious, quite authentic inability to think” (ibid., 417). This leads her to explore the question: “Do the inability to think and a disastrous failure of what we commonly call conscience coincide?” (ibid., 418). 105 Alexander Etkind has also suggested that the protagonist of Empire V, Roman/Rama, may be read as an Eichmann analog. Lipovetsky and Etkind, “The Salamander’s Return,” 18. 106 Khagi, Pelevin and Unfreedom, 194. 107 Ibid., 197. 108 Sally Dalton-Brown, “Looking for the Creator: Pelevin and the Impotent Writer in T (2009) and Ananasnaia voda dlia prekrasnoi damu (2011),” Modern Language Review 109, no. 1 ( January 2014): 200.

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concerning not only the status of T’s existence (does he exist, and if so, in what sense?) but also the nature of the author and the reader.109 He endeavors to assert his own will, ultimately killing Ariel and finally arriving at Optina Pustyn. Some critics find here an optimistic ending. Andrei Arkhangelsky characterizes it as a “humanistic finale” where Count T realizes that “he does indeed exist, that he’s not a fiction, and that those who seem to manipulate him actually only make suggestions.”110 However, the killing of Ariel is jeopardized by the novel’s paratextual publishing data, which lists “A. E. Brakhman,” outlined in a black square, as the “literary editor” of the novel T, authored by “Pelevin Viktor Olegovich.” This detail throws into suspense whatever agency and sense of real existence Count T experiences. Other critics find T potentially redeems literature through the figure of the reader. Citing Count T’s experience at a meeting with the followers of Solovyov, Dalton-Brown points out that he is encouraged to “sense the reader in ourselves—that secret force, creating us at the very same moment as we read” (“pytaemsia oshchutit' v sebe Chitatelia — tainstvennuiu silu, sozdaiushchuiu nas v etu samuiu minutu”),111 and to believe he is “not a line in the Book of Life, but its reader. That light that renders the page visible” (“Ty ne stroka v Knige Zhizni, a ee chitatel'. Tot svet, kotoryi delaet stranitsu vidimoi”).112 She argues, “Pelevin makes a philosophical point that the purpose behind literature—the ‘light’—is the familiar and indeed old-fashioned one of illuminating our life, to allow us to come closer to an understanding of why we were created. This renders reader and character alike in quest.”113 For Dalton-Brown, Pelevin continues Russian literature’s traditional quest for answers “to the ‘eternal questions’ of who we are, and what life is really all about” somewhat paradoxically, presenting it as an embrace of the state of “not knowing,” since this “brings us closer to the divine mystery of life.”114 Nevertheless, Pelevin’s portrayal of the intelligentsia across his oeuvre exhibits a sustained concern with—and critique of—this institution. Not only 109 Dalton-Brown proposes the central concern of T is “authorial impotence” in the (post) modern world: “It is not only that the author now is less creator than ‘commodifier,’ churning out potboilers to make sales. Pelevin also asks whether any remaining vestiges of the author’s creative power may have been delegated to the reader or even to the characters” (ibid.). 110 Andrei Arkhangel'skii, “Pelevin Nikolaevich Tolstoi,” Ogonek 24 (October 26, 2009): 46. 111 Viktor Pelevin, T (Moscow: Eksmo, 2009), 297. 112 Ibid., 296. 113 Dalton-Brown, “Looking for the Creator,” 210. 114 Ibid., 218.

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do Pelevin’s intelligentsia not oppose the ills of techno-consumer society, they are integral to its establishment, the rise of unfreedom, and the devolution and dehumanization of the human subject. Moreover, in Pelevin’s narratives “no correlation obtains between knowledge and ethical behavior.”115 Examples that illustrate these points are too numerous to catalogue here, but a few are worth mention. In “The Crystal World” (“Khrustal'nyi mir”) from the collection The Blue Lantern (Sinii fonar', 1991), “Yuri and Nikolai (i.e., the prerevolutionary intelligentsia) fail in their duty to save Russia because they do nothing. . . . As the intelligentsia are prone to do, the cadets seek solace in artistic disquisitions.”116 In “Anti-Aircraft Codices of Al-Efesbi” (“Zenitnye kodeksy Al'Efesbi”) of the collection Pineapple Water for the Beautiful Lady (Ananasnaia voda dlia prekrasnoi damy, 2010), the protagonist is a typical intelligent who once wrote lyric poetry and art criticism, “a former professor and cultural critic who finds his true vocation in destroying unmanned American aircraft over Afghanistan.”117 He uses verbal attacks to ignite intense emotion in the computer controlling the drone, eliciting its first rumblings of sentience that are, however, halted by an information overload—leading to the crash of the drone and the budding sentient being within it. The protagonist’s preferred instrument is language: his verbal formulations spark consciousness (literalizing the metaphor that writers are “engineers of the human soul”), and kill. Language is also weaponized in S.N.U.F.F. (2012) by the “discoursemonger” Bernard-Henri Montaigne-Montesquieu, who behaves as a false prophet. Repeatedly Pelevin’s texts represent the intelligentsia, those who wield discourse, and the institution of literature in a discomfiting manner. Perhaps this discomfiture is the point. In a Heideggerian gesture, Pelevin’s narratives force an unease and anxiety about literature upon the reader, disallowing any cozying-up between the reader, author, and text. Instead there yawns a suspicious gap, a troubling question about whether literature, authors, and readers were the problem all along. Could it be exactly here that Pelevin means to leave us: doubtful, answerless, only wondering? “For questioning is the piety of thought.”118

115 Khagi, Pelevin and Unfreedom, 179. 116 Ibid., 137. 117 Ibid., 101. 118 Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper, 1997), 35.

CHAPTER 7

Transformative Reading for Tailless Monkeys: Metamorphosis in The Sacred Book of the Werewolf GRACE MAHONEY, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

I

n a 2004 interview, Victor Pelevin stated that in the process of composing his latest novel, The Sacred Book of the Werewolf (Sviashchennaia kniga oborotnia), his connection with the lead character, a magical fox, was so strong that “several times it seemed to [him] that [he] was tapping on the computer keys with fox paws.”1 Channeling the voice of his muse induced an illusory bodily transformation. Presented as a found text authored by the immortal were-fox A Huli, The Sacred Book of the Werewolf would have been typed by her hand (or paws) to be discovered on a laptop at the site of her disappearance. Pelevin’s description of his perceived metamorphosis in the heat of churning out this novel not only offers readers a fantastic if somewhat humorous image of the author, but it also manifests one of the most significant themes of the book and of his oeuvre. With The Sacred Book of the Werewolf as the central focus, this chapter examines the role of metamorphosis across Pelevin’s works as a critical leitmotif that offers new inroads for reading his texts. 1 Victor Pelevin, “Neskol′ko raz mne mereshchilos′, budto ia stuchu po klavisham lis′imi lapami,” interview by Natal′ia Kochetkova, Izvestiia, November 16, 2004, https://pelevinlive.ru/38.

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Several scholars have engaged the topic of metamorphosis as part of their analysis of Pelevin’s work, and the present chapter traces and expands on their arguments to demonstrate that metamorphosis in Pelevin’s writing is not only a character function or plot device but permeates multiple aspects of the text and critically bears on the author’s literary project as a whole.2 Pelevin presents transforming characters, mixes genres, evolves images across works, and proffers puns and neologisms that morph linguistic meaning over and over. While these elements relate to the fragmentation of the contemporary subject and operate in a grotesquely amalgamized post-Soviet setting, more often than not they promote the agency and transcendence that metamorphosis and related concepts afford. Metamorphosis in Pelevin is not specific to were-creatures, like A Huli, but unfolds at a variety of registers that speak to a range of social, political, and cultural issues. In Pelevin’s work, metamorphosis both produces and embodies paradox, subversion, transgression, and dynamism—horrific, hopeful, and often something in between.

Metamorphoses: Biology, Politics, Culture Metamorphosis, from the Greek, means transformation (from meta- [after] and morphe [form]), and in the strictest sense refers to zoological transformation, either as part of a species’ growth—phasing from one form to another—or, more fantastically, bodily transformation between animal, human, or divine and demonic entities. From the phases of butterfly development to the shift from human to animal as in the case of werewolves, zoomorphs populate the biological world, religion, myth, and fantasy. Relatedly, similar but not interchangeable concepts point to the movement between or composition of different 2 See Alexander Etkind, “Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied: Magical Historicism in Contemporary Russian Fiction,” Slavic Review 68, no. 3 (2009): 631–658; Alexander Genis, “Borders and Metamorphoses: Viktor Pelevin in the Context of Post-Soviet Literature,” in Russian Postmodernism: New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture, ed. Mikhail Epstein, Alexander Genis, and Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover, trans. Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover (New York: Berghahn Books, 2016), 276–289; Sofya Khagi, “The Monstrous Aggregate of the Social: Toward Biopolitics in Victor Pelevin’s Work,” The Slavic and East European Journal 55, no. 3 (2011): 439–459; Mark Lipovetskii, Paralogii: Transformatsii (post)modernistskogo diskursa v russkoi kul′ture 1920–2000-kh godov (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2008), 641–681; Liza Novikova, “Knigi za nedeliu,” Kommersant 211 (2004): 22, https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/523797; and Trevor Wilson, “Nothing but Mammals: Post-Soviet Sexuality After the End of History,” in The Human Reimagined: Posthumanism in Russia, ed. Colleen McQuillen and Julia Vaingurt (Brookline, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2018), 197–217.

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forms such as hybridity, fluidity, mediation, bifurcation, fragmentation, flux, liminality, and in-betweenness. Hybridity is the most significantly related concept, since this kind of metamorphosis involves a full or partial change of form yet some of what was before—namely substance—always remains, resulting in a hybrid mixture that constitutes a single entity after its transformation. In cultural studies both substantive and illusory metamorphosis signals a crossing or violation of boundaries and borders—not only of the flesh but of social constructs relating to class, gender, and race. Metamorphic beings have the capacity to mediate binaries and transgress the sanctity of categorical absolutes. Metamorphosis critically points out the categorization and ordering of things; it reveals the structures and hierarchies of the natural and constructed world.3 Hybridity, then, subverts constructs of wholeness, often propagated by dominant powers to the exclusion of the marginalized.4 The hybridized subject harbors split and phantom identities, doubles and alter egos. Metamorphic movement can be perceived as transcendent, ascendant, or descendent, and may signal enlightenment, evolution, or regression. Unlike the repetition of cyclical movement, metamorphosis moves in a centripetal motion towards a goal.5 Often associated with evolution and progress, biological and cultural metamorphosis offers survival through adaptation. Ever since the eighteenth-century Petrine reforms, intended to forcefully transform Russia into a Western empire, Russian writers have been preoccupied with the metamorphic subject.6 Peter Barta considers Russia after 1991 the quintessential metamorph, a nation composed of “All its previous particularities—superimposed on each other over centuries of ideological confrontations and contradictions. . . . It continues to be neither Western nor Asian; an industrial country with Third-World characteristics; supremely cultured and yet profoundly uncivilized.”7 Metamorphs abound in the post-Soviet cultural sphere. Post-Soviet identities are not only bifurcated along the lines Barta suggests but are also subjected to uncertain evolutionary processes in the struggle for survival. The ideology of what was is reissued in new forms under See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random House, 1970). 4 See Homi Bhabba, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). 5 Genis, “Borders and Metamorphoses,” 287. 6 Including Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy. See extended analysis on these connections and others in Peter I. Barta, ed., Metamorphoses in Russian Modernism (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2000). 7 Peter I. Barta, “Introduction: Russian Literature and the Metamorphic Theme,” in Metamorphoses in Russian Modernism, 11. 3

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new forces, resulting in hybridized subjects—often zoomorphic and fantastical. Investigating the evolution of social attitudes towards sex, Trevor Wilson argues “After the collapse of the Soviet Union, cultural depictions of the human body fracture at the juncture of animal and non-animal. This crisis in representation seems to arise precisely in conjunction with the emergence of socially (here, sexually) deviant subjects who trouble an easier, earlier imagination of the Soviet totality.”8 Alexander Genis suggests that post-Soviet writers deal with the world they have inherited in a way that unmasks it as a “sequence of artificial constructs” that promise a “pure,” “archetypal” reality.9 The numerous borders of post-Soviet society must be crossed, straddled, and re-crossed. Mark Lipovetsky notes that in cultural expression, were-creatures function not simply as a fantasy element, but as “the archetype of postmodern (and post-Soviet) identity that illustrates the constant fluctuation between opposing principles intertwined in a single personality.”10 The transgressive hybridized identities that appear in post-Soviet culture take multiple and slippery forms; they have the agency to overcome the past and the self through continual reinvention.

Pelevin’s Early Metamorphs In Pelevin’s writing, the author’s use of metamorphosis evolves as he hones his literary style while engaging Russia’s ongoing transformation after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In his earliest works, metamorphosis often provides an ending twist, where characters are revealed to be of a different gender or animal species, as in the case of the transgender sex workers in “Mid-Game” (“Mittel′shpil′,” 1991), the talking parrot of “Sigmund in a Café” (“Zigmund v kafe,” 1993), the chickens who fly the coup in “Hermit and Six Toes” (“Zatvornik i Shestipalyi,” 1990), and the beloved cat in “Nika” (1992).11 Through distortions, illusions, and mirrors, Pelevin’s early works unveil things to be other than

  8 Wilson, “Nothing but Mammals,” 199.   9 Genis, “Borders and Metamorphoses,” 279. 10 Lipovetskii, Paralogii, 642. 11 Victor Pelevin, “Mid-Game,” in The Blue Lantern, trans. Andrew Bromfield (London: Harbord Publishing Limited, 1997), 107–138; originally published in Russian as Viktor Pelevin, “Mittel′shpil′,” in his Sinii Fonar′ (Moscow: Al′fa Fantastika, 1991); “Nika,” in The Blue Lantern, 91–106; originally published in Russian as “Nika,” Iunost’ 6–8 (1992); “Hermit and Six Toes,” in The Blue Lantern, 23–64; originally published in Russian as “Zatvornik i shestipalyi,” Khimiia i zhizn′ 3 (1990): 94–106; “Sigmund in a Café,” published in Russian as “Zigmund v kafe,” Nezavisimaia gazeta, April 30, 1993.

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what the reader has been led to believe. These distortions, Genis argues, subordinate reality to Pelevin’s “didactic purpose.”12 Perhaps the most prominent example of Pelevin’s early use of metamorphosis as allegory is the novel The Life of Insects (Zhizn′ nasekomykh, 1993), which tells the stories of several characters that seamlessly shift between human and insect form.13 True to the zeitgeist, the zoomorphic creatures must adapt, die, eat, or be eaten in the brave new world of 1990s Russia. Pelevin choses an apt symbol for commenting on the lower echelons of human behavior, and yet, insect behavior often proves itself to be morally higher than that of humans in its forthrightness. As an American salesman doing business in Russia, Sam preys on the vulnerable economy and local young women. As a mosquito, Sam’s bloodsucking is predatory but also natural. His human behavior, in contrast, is even more grotesque. Constituting a set of fables, in The Life of Insects, the characters whose stories end well are able to overcome the splintering of the subject in contemporary life. Seryozha the cockroach cannot find satisfaction through his lateral digging movements—even when he emigrates to America. It is only when he thinks to dig upwards, reach the surface, and evolve as a cicada that he realizes his true potential and finds satisfaction. Other characters, such as the dung beetle, are content with their status and instinct-driven role in life. As in a state of nirvana, they can accept death peacefully. This kind of evolution towards unity is most palpable in the case of the firefly, Dima-Mitya, who ultimately resolves the dual nature of his personality (symbolized by two nicknames for the same name, Dimitry), becomes whole, and flies off toward the horizon. As Pelevin’s corpus grows, so does his use of metamorphosis as a subject and device. Pelevin reuses characters across texts, and his themes evolve out of previous publications. Critically, the easy resolutions that metamorphosis afforded in early works, especially in terms of enlightenment and liberation, become more difficult for characters to attain—if not impossible.14 As these concepts develop, nearly all characters are portrayed as hybridized in 12 Genis, “Borders and Metamorphoses,” 281. 13 Victor Pelevin, The Life of Insects, trans. Andrew Bromfield (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1999); originally published in Russian as Zhizn′ nasekomykh, Znamia 4 (1993): 6–65. For an extended analysis of The Life of Insects, see Genis, “Borders and Metamorphoses,” and Keith Livers, “Bugs in the Body Politic: The Search for Self in Viktor Pelevin’s The Life of Insects,” The Slavic and East European Journal 46, no. 1 (2002): 1–28. 14 Sofya Khagi aptly notes that in Pelevin’s mature works his protagonists cannot simply “escape the bounds of their prison into freedom” nor “attain genuine self-enlightenment” like the chickens of “Hermit and Six Toes” or Dima-Mitya of The Life of Insects. Instead, in

CHAPTER 7    Transformative Reading for Tailless Monkeys

some way. As Liza Novikova suggests, the shifting but related forms of characters, institutions, and concepts across Pelevin’s texts amass a collective of were-creatures.15 Sofya Khagi clarifies that the “web of auto-references” is not per se unique to Pelevin or constructed for its own sake but that these evolving themes “[expose] layers of conspiracy never quite reaching a hidden truth.”16 Not unlike the centripetal movement of metamorphosis itself, this persistent and inward-looking movement towards the truth, however unattainable, rests at the core of most of Pelevin’s writing.17 Pelevin introduced werewolves, the transforming creature par excellence of folklore, fantasy, and horror, at the outset of his literary career in the short story, “A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia” (“Problema vervolka v srednei polose,” 1991). Unsuccessful in his attempt to hitchhike in the Russian countryside, teenage Muscovite Sasha feels invisible until he happens upon a pack of werewolves at the edge of the forest. Having been initiated into their evening hunt, Sasha notes his increased sensory perception in wolf form and more: “The greatest transformation that Sasha sensed was in his own awareness of himself. . . . The change in his self-awareness affected the meaning of life . . . continuously and clearly as an eternal quality of the world itself. . . . Life without this feeling seemed like a long, tormenting dream, dim and incomprehensible.”18 Pelevin paradoxically suggests that the bifurcated identity of werewolf creates a whole subject through the positive power of transformation. Supposedly making their way to hunt cattle on the Michurin Collective Farm, the werewolves instead abduct a member from the local town for expulsion

15 16 17

18

later works, “knowledge, if any is to be gained, will serve to perpetuate the status quo.” Khagi, “The Monstrous Aggregate of the Social,” 443–444. Novikova, “Knigi za nedeliu.” Khagi, “The Monstrous Aggregate of the Social,” 440. Pelevin’s reuses of characters and themes allow for the organic growth of a socio-metaphysical model out of previous iterations and, most importantly, points to a consistent strain “underlying all of these multiple schemes,” namely, “the hypercommodification of life resulting in dehumanization and social reduction.” Ibid., 440. Victor Pelevin, “A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia,” in A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia and Other Stories, trans. Andrew Bromfield (New York: New Directions, 1998), 1–35, here 15–16; originally published in Russian as “Vervolki srednei polosy: sovremennaia skazka,” NF 35 (1991): 165–189. Genis argues that, as a symmetrical counterbalance to the Soviet sots-realist portrayal of man as half-god, post-Soviet writers engage the realm of beasts to the end that “the transformation of a man into an animal fills the soul of a werewolf with sublime meaning.” Genis, “Borders and Metamorphoses,” 287.

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from the pack.19 To complete his initiation, Sasha must fight the veteran wolf despite the overwhelming odds of defeat: “The wolf in him had taken control of his actions—he no longer felt any doubt.”20 The animal, not human, side of Sasha brings him victory and ascension in status and self-perception. Among the pack, Sasha initially sees his wolf shadow cast alongside a group of human shadows, but after winning the fight, his shadow is human while he remains in wolf form. The shadow play points to Sasha’s evolution from his former invisibility to visibility through the discovery of his identity as a werewolf, victory over his rival, and earning his place in the pack. Although the story’s title suggests that werewolves in Russia are a minority at the fringes of society, Sasha’s discoveries about werewolf culture reveal them to be an innate, long-standing, and powerful species living in Russia. While the group Sasha encounters congregates in the wilderness beyond a village, their hunt on state property has been arranged with members at “the top,” indicating that they operate at the most important levels of Russian society—a theme Pelevin fully explores in The Sacred Book of the Werewolf.21 Led by a colonel, the pack is distinctly military, with old ties to the Red Army (“How do you think we drove the Whites across Siberia?”) and the secret police, as it hunts one of its own, extracting him from his house in the dead of night.22 Wilson notes that Pelevin “blurs any true distinction between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders,’” as the older veteran is cast out and the unsuspecting Sasha is initiated.23 Perhaps even more surprising, the story implies that a werewolf may, in fact, be the truest kind of person. According to Sasha’s packmates, the transformation from human to wolf is not only “one of the most ancient traditions of our homeland,” but also because werewolves are “real people” in the sense that all humans possess animal qualities: 19 The name “Michurin” refers to Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin, a Soviet botanist famous for breeding new plant species through hybridization not unlike the hybridization of human and wolf of the mythical werewolf. The two go hand-in-hand, just as in early visions, the glory and success of the Soviet state were devised in scientifically adept agricultural models and a ferocious police and military apparatus. 20 Victor Pelevin, “A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia,” 27. 21 Ibid., 16. Pelevin also suggests the existence of a greater were-universe beyond wolves. Although it receives little explanation, this “order” seems to be oriented along racial and occupational lines. For example, the Central Asian woman who assists the pack in Sasha’s initiation ritual is a were-cobra (ibid., 15). Were-owls fly over the pack and are referred to as sponsors at the poultry farm and a bunch of “tough customers” (ibid., 18). 22 Ibid., 19. 23 Wilson, “Nothing but Mammals,” 210.

CHAPTER 7    Transformative Reading for Tailless Monkeys “You must always remember that only werewolves are real people. If you look at your shadow, you’ll see that it’s human. But if you look at people’s shadows with your wolf ’s eyes, you’ll see the shadows of pigs, cocks, toads. . . .” “And spiders, flies, and bats, too . . .” “That’s right. And then there are the monkeys, the rabbits, and the goats.”24

If the true nature of werewolves is undetermined, then so is the true nature of humans. Pelevin suggests that external forms only reveal one side of any individual’s hybrid nature.

A Were-Novel

Utagawa Kuniyoshi, (1798–1861), a depiction of the character Kuzhunoha, a magical fox spirit (kitsune) of Japanese folklore. Women figured as magical foxes are popular characters of folklore in China and Japan. Here, the kitsune stands in female form while casting a fox shadow on the screen. Public domain.

24 Pelevin, “A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia,” 33. This “tradition,” which “has miraculously survived all of the trials of the years of oppression,” rings as an unwittingly ironic sentiment espoused by the human supporter who outs the veteran pack member, Nikolai Petrovich, as a werewolf. Likely, it was the literal werewolves in uniform that were carrying out the trials and thriving in the years of oppression. Ibid., 24.

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Over the course of Pelevin’s writing career, his were-creatures that once haunted the margins of Soviet society come to rule reality. Young Sasha from “A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia” grows into his werewolf identity and reappears in The Sacred Book of the Werewolf as a successful officer in the Russian secret police (FSB) thriving in the veritable were-society of mid-2000s Russia. While the initial concept for the novel may have been based on a socio-political reference to “werewolves in uniform” (oborotni v pogonakh), an idiom which populated the Russian media in the early 2000s, Pelevin’s thinking on this concept evolved to include more members of society who are also susceptible to corruption.25 Many social actors don disguises of legitimacy to conceal other selves. Pelevin, then, seamlessly transposes the wolfpack in the woods to the center of the Russian world. Full of transformations, illusions, hybridity, and transcendence, metamorphosis is the norm in the universe that Pelevin creates in The Sacred Book of the Werewolf. Set in contemporary Moscow and narrated from the perspective of an immortal Chinese were-fox, A Huli, the plot relates the adventures of its protagonist who survives by posing as a teenage prostitute and absorbing the sexual energy of her clients to sustain her immortality. The magical fox casts an illusion with her tail, and while the client fornicates with a phantom, A Huli assimilates the human’s sexual energy. Through one of her customers, A Huli is discovered as a magical creature by the FSB and brought in for questioning by an officer and werewolf, Mikhalych. After a botched interrogation, she meets Mikhalych’s superior officer, the lieutenant-general Alexander (Sasha) Sery. Alexander solicits A Huli’s services, but when she initiates the visualization, he proves immune to her powers. Upon seeing her fox form, Alexander becomes aroused—which initiates his transformation into a wolf. He has sex with A Huli, and they begin a romantic relationship.26 After they have been together for some time, A Huli kisses Alexander on the lips in an act of love, but instead of transforming into his wolf form, Alexander 25 “A werewolf in uniform” refers to policemen who take bribes—this term was popularized in an anti-corruption campaign against the Russian Ministry of the Interior in the early 2000s. See Pelevin, “Neskol′ko raz mne mereshchilos′, budto ia stuchu po klavisham lis′imi lapami” and Lipovetskii, Paralogii, 643 26 Even though A Huli has been in multiple sexual situations over the course of her long life, she has only experienced sex through her visualizations. This is the first time A Huli has intercourse in her fox form and thus loses her “virginity”—a type of transformation. Victor Pelevin, The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, trans. Andrew Bromfield (New York: Viking Penguin, 2008), 108; originally published in Russian as Sviashchennaia kniga oborotnia (Moscow: Eksmo, 2004).

CHAPTER 7    Transformative Reading for Tailless Monkeys

becomes a dog. Trying to come to terms with his new identity, Alexander tells himself he is the super-werewolf of cult prophesy. Knowing better, A Huli recounts her understanding of the super-werewolf from a teaching Buddha gave to were-creatures: The super-werewolf is “a were-creature who succeeds in entering the Rainbow Stream.”27 If A Huli follows this teaching, she can save herself as well as point the way to liberation for all were-creatures living on earth. To enter the Rainbow Stream, she must find “the key,” which she must come to possess through gaining an understanding of her own nature. She realizes that the key she had previously been unable to find is love. Despite A Huli’s efforts to help Alexander understand Buddha’s teaching, he still believes himself to be the super-werewolf and leaves A Huli to take back the power he lost at the FSB when he became a dog. Understanding her own path to the Rainbow Stream, A Huli rides her bike to Bitsevsky Park and launches off a ramp. The moment of her transcendence from the world is shared at the beginning of the novel through eyewitness accounts of “a bluish glow above the treetops, ball of lightning, and a large number of five-colored rainbows.”28 What she leaves behind are her teachings for other were-creatures to find the path to their final metamorphosis, the manuscript “A Huli” retitled The Sacred Book of the Werewolf. Pelevin morphs generic conventions and parses cultural references to create a were-novel in style and content that satirically shifts between twisted fairytale, cynical love story, and hybridized fantasy. The fairytale plots the characters play out transpose them into different roles throughout the novel that upend conventional tropes. Redheaded A Huli’s first meeting with uniformed Alexander in his apartment rings of Little Red Riding Hood’s encounter with the disguised wolf—yet she too is a predatory monster. A Huli is again cast in the role of innocent, storybook girl with Alexander as the handsome prince when he refers to their meeting as “fate” and presents A Huli with a rose, likening their relationship to the tale “The Little Scarlet Flower” (“Alen′kii tsvetochek”) in Sergei Aksakov’s Russian Fairy Tales.29 Whereas Alexander’s reading of the tale ends with “love conquers all,” A Huli promptly deconstructs the story in a Freudian reading on defloration “overcoming incest.”30 As in fairytales and 27 A Huli is the only were-creature on earth to have this teaching because her predecessor, who received the initial teaching from Buddha, has disappeared—assumedly having succeeded in entering the Rainbow Stream. Ibid., 289–304. 28 Ibid., ix. 29 Ibid., 102. 30 Ibid., 103–104.

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romance, the climax of their relationship comes in the moment of “true love’s kiss,” but instead of the ascendant transformation of beast to prince, Alexander becomes a deformed mutt.31 Their romantic relationship ends in mock tragedy with Alexander leaving A Huli for his career pursuits cast as patriotic duty, but also for the shallow reason that he feels A Huli is too old for him, and he now finds the thought of having sex with her repulsive. Pelevin’s twists on these wellknown plotlines complicate the didacticism of the fairy tale genre and dissolve the conventional roles of good-evil, predator-prey, and hero-heroine. While recasting and upending the generic categories of folklore and mythology as well as drawing on contemporary context, Pelevin delivers nonstop cultural references, especially to literature, embedded in imagery, reproduced in dialogue, or referenced outright. The theory of intertextuality, based in Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism, asserts that all texts absorb and transform other texts.32 An intertext is a metamorphosis of an earlier text that, while retaining its former, distinct identity, extends its meaning and effect to a new (con)text.33 Pelevin plays with this kind of literary metamorphosis across his oeuvre, but it is a technique felt especially in a novel narrated by a creature with over a thousand years of reading and personal encounters with the most famous figures in history. Many intertextual references in The Sacred Book of the Werewolf relate to other famous metamorphs of Russian literature and culture, such as when A Huli perceives mounted riders as the Bronze Horseman—a statue terrifyingly come to life in Alexander Pushkin’s poem of the same name (Mednyi vsadnik, 1833).34 Pelevin references Mikhail Bulgakov’s infamous man-dog hybrid, Sharik, of Heart of a Dog (Sobach′e serdtse, 1925), divulging that Bulgakov’s story was “based on rumors” of an actual anthroposophist named Sharikov who, after being taken by the Cheka, was the first Soviet dog voluntarily launched into space.35 With the reference to Bulgakov’s bestial satire of the Soviet experiment, Pelevin draws the parallel between the post-Soviet quest for 31 Ibid., 242. 32 Julia Kristeva, “Word, Dialogue and Novel,” in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi, 34–61 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 37. Quoted from Barta, “Introduction,” 5. 33 Barta, “Introduction,” 4–5. 34 Pelevin, The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, 200. Not only is the transformation of the statue of Peter the Great into a living entity in Pushkin’s poem a kind of metamorphosis resulting in a hybridized force of terror, but the myth of Saint Petersburg that Pushkin engages symbolizes the forced transformation of Russia through the figure of Peter immortalized in bronze. Barta, “Introduction,” 3. 35 Ibid., 186 and 324–325.

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a super-werewolf and the Soviet ideology of the “new man.” Pelevin’s numerous references and allusions to Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) not only riff on the play Nabokov makes between the transformative phase of Dolores Haze as a nymphet and its entomological counterpart, but also point to Pelevin’s reinterpretation of his own novel as a found text, where the authorial voice comes not from Humbert Humbert—“the metaphorical chairman of the world’s board of directors”—but from the marginalized Lolita, “the symbol of the soul.”36 A Huli certainly feels a kinship with Dolores Haze—she is perpetually young, sexual, and transgressive. Yet unlike Lolita’s innocence and inexperience, A Huli’s position as an immortal werefox equips her to navigate the thorny labyrinth of human existence.

A Huli’s Path Unlike a werewolf that morphs between an entirely human and an entirely wolf state, in stasis A Huli maintains both human and fox qualities. And, although her fox nature is amplified when she uses her tail to cast illusions or when chicken hunting, A Huli always projects hybrid qualities. Like Dolores Haze, A Huli’s human image is at the cusp between girlhood and womanhood. Beyond that, multiple aspects of her appearance suggest in-betweenness or hybridity, especially in terms of gender and sexuality. In her description of her kind, magical foxes possess: Slender, shapely bodies without a trace of fat and magnificently defined musculature—the kind that some teenagers who do sport have. We have fine, silky, gleaming hair that’s a bright fiery-red color. We are tall, and in ancient times that often used to give us away, but nowadays people have become taller and so this feature doesn’t make us stand out at all. Although we don’t have any sex in the sense of the ability to reproduce, all of its external signs are present—you could never take a fox for a man. Straight women usually take us for 36 Ibid., 50. As an avid lepidopterist, Nabokov was keenly aware of the parallels between nymphs as the immature form of many invertebrate species that morph into adulthood and the image of the nymphet that he constructs in Lolita. Lipovetsky makes a similar point regarding Pelevin’s invocation of Dolores Haze and also discusses parallels between A Huli and the female characters of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novels that are simultaneously pure and impure: Sonya in Crime and Punishment (Prestuplenie i nakazanie, 1866) and Matryosha of the censored chapter “At Tikhon’s” (“U Tikhona”) in Demons (Besy, 1871). Lipovetskii, Paralogii, 654–655.

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Part Four    Metamorphosis and Utopia lesbians. Lesbians usually go nuts. And it’s not surprising. Beside us even the most beautiful women look crude and unfinished—like a carelessly dressed block of stone beside a completed sculpture. Our breasts are small and perfectly formed, with small, dark-brown nipples. At the spot where women have their most important dream factory we have something similar in appearance—an imitative organ with a function I’ll tell you about later. It doesn’t serve for childbirth. And at the back we have a tail, a fluffy, flexible, fiery-red antenna. The tail can become larger or smaller: in the sleeping state it’s like a ponytail about ten or fifteen centimeters long, but in the working state it can reach almost a meter in length.37

A Huli’s beauty is alluring and almost unearthly, as she likens herself to a perfected sculpture compared with the roughly hewn forms of human women.38 With a somewhat androgynous body and pansexual orientation, A Huli does not fit neatly into traditional normative categories. And despite all her feminine qualities, her tail in its working state suggests an erect penis.39 Hailing from ancient China, A Huli’s current pose as an underage prostitute in modern-day Russia emphasizes the exilic and transient quality of her life; she does not belong to any one place or time, which results in her temporal and spatial liminality.40 Not only are A Huli’s human qualities hybrid and her status in society marginal, but transgressive and contradictory qualities also pertain to her identity as a fox—a creature that in nature possesses metamorphic traits. In constructing the world of magical foxes, Pelevin draws on the image of the fox in a variety of cultures, especially Chinese and Russian folk culture where foxes are anthropomorphized and associated with cynical trickery. The association of foxes with beautiful women is particularly strong in East-Asian culture. For 37 Pelevin, The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, 16–17. 38 The unreality of A Huli’s perfected body alludes to the objectification of women’s bodies under the male gaze—a cultural norm rooted in the Pygmalion myth of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in which an ivory sculpture transforms into a woman at the desire of her creator. Pelevin develops a more sustained play on the Pygmalion myth in his 2008 novella, The Hall of the Singing Caryatids (Zal poiushchikh kariatid) where sex workers at an elite nightclub must pose as performing statues. 39 For an extended analysis on transgressive sexuality in The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, see Wilson, “Nothing but Mammals,” 197–217. 40 Citing two famous exiles, Ovid and Pushkin, Barta notes the affinity of the exilic experience with metamorphosis, “a liminal condition between past and present, between the life before exile and the new intellectual experience of displacement.” Barta, “Introduction,” 4.

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example, in Chinese, huli jing, meaning “fox essence,” is a colloquial expression that connotes the dualism of “the enchantment of a female beauty and her power of lustful destruction.”41 According to the mythology of the novel, foxes cross several realms of existence: the human, the animal, and the demonic. In Chinese culture, “foxes lie in between darkness and lightness; divine transcendents and demons follow different ways, and foxes lie in between.”42 These multiple and often contradictory essences pertain not only to the spiritual-cult iterations of foxes but also to their perceived role in nature: “For the Chinese, the [biological] fox has long been ‘betwixt and between’: it roams in the wild and remains untamable for domestic uses, yet it preys on domestic fowl, builds dens in human settlements, and demonstrates quasi-human intelligence. No clear line divides natural and supernatural foxes in popular imagination.”43

Richard Barrett Davis (1802–1854), Hunting Scene: a Fox followed by Hounds and Huntsmen in Full Cry, down a Hill. Mounted riders and hounds pursue a fox in a typical hunt scene. A Huli and her sisters upend traditional fox hunting, wherein the magical foxes “hunt” for prey among the aristocracy. Public domain.

41 Xiaofei Kang, The Cult of the Fox: Power, Gender, and Popular Religion in Late Imperial and Modern China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 2. In literature, foxes exist in the form of “spellbinding beauties, whose female charm exemplifies the perpetual struggle for human control of unbridled desires” (ibid., 4). For an extended analysis of Chinese literary sources and their analogues in The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, see Lipovetskii, Paralogii, 655–658. 42 Ji Hun, Yuewei Caotang Biji (1800), 216. Quoted in Xiaofei Kang, The Cult of the Fox, 2. 43 Ibid., 2.

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While Pelevin’s magical foxes predominantly inhabit the human world, they can morph into a more complete fox form through activities like chicken hunting. A Huli enjoys nabbing chickens from farms and carrying them off into the forest. She does this not for the animal motivation to kill and eat prey but for the sensation of morphing into a form that more closely resembles her counterparts in nature. The shame of stealing and the thrill of being chased by angry farmers triggers her metamorphosis.44 Her transformation, then, is based on heightened emotion brought about by transgressive actions committed at the border between civilization and the wilderness. Traditional mythologies present foxes as transgressive and complex beings that possess both positive and negative qualities. As Lipovetsky argues, Pelevin’s employment of the were-trope and characterization of foxes less imbues A Huli with the simplistic qualities of trickster or seductress than uses her unique and magical capability to mediate between binaries: animal and human, old age and youth, innocence and sophistication, idealism and cynicism, East and West.45 This liminality does not result in A Huli becoming polarized between two extremes, but enables her to hold a range of possibilities in her own character. Her interpretation of the world in the thoughts that she shares with readers results from a multifaceted range of experience that spans and overcomes binary constructs. Pelevin’s text highlights A Huli’s hybridity and character through her many essences that are conveyed by speaking names and internal voices. A Huli explains that, although in Chinese her name literally means “the fox named A,” in Russian the name sounds like an obscenity.46 Her many aliases not only enable her to escape the vulgarity of her name and hide her identity as an immortal magical creature, but they also speak to the multiple aspects of her character.47 Even Ada—the inspiration for her online alias, Adele—derived from Nabokov’s eponymous novel (1969), conjures multiple meanings: on 44 A Huli and her sisters also “hunt” English aristocrats as sexual prey in an inversion of the sport that saw the killing of many foxes over the centuries. Pelevin, The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, 196–204. 45 Lipovetskii, Paralogii, 658–659. 46 Pelevin, The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, 2. 47 Several of A Huli’s nicknames refer to her fox identity. In her passport, her name is Alisa Lee—the same as the trickster fox character from Aleksey Tolstoy’s Adventures of Buratino (Zolotoi kliuchik, ili prikliucheniia Buratino, 1936). Alisa and Lisa derive from the Russian word for fox, lisa. Characters who know her as a fox, namely Alexander and her magical fox sisters E Huli and U Huli, call A Huli by a variety of nicknames that relate to her red hair, like Red and Ginger.

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the one hand, the Russian expression for “ah yes” (a da) and on the other, the word for hell (ad).48 Having lived for over two thousand years, A Huli possesses immense learned wisdom and thinks with multiple perspectives in mind. Often, she separately lists her thoughts, or inner voices as she calls them, to address various ways of thinking about a particular situation. Not unlike an internalized version of Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism, A Huli explains that these (up to five) voices construct an internal conversation, which can turn into argument. Intimating that her own consciousness remains separate from each anonymous voice, A Huli waits “for a hint at the right answer.”49 Not only do these multiple perspectives further differentiate foxes from humans who do not think this way, but these many thoughts that A Huli presents to the reader further designate her as a metamorphic mediator of multiplicities. This mediating position, Lipovetsky notes, results in not a fragmented but a whole character, who moves through a fragmented world.50

Sasha Sery’s Path To craft A Huli’s partner and foil, Pelevin draws on several antecedents—universal heroic types, culturally specific references, and reused cast members from his literary company—to compose Alexander “Sasha” Sery, who follows the path of power and destruction that A Huli avoids. From the outset of the novel, Alexander has all the signs of a storybook hero: he is handsome, wealthy, romantic, and powerful. His position and rank at the FSB cloaks him in power and mystique more than sinister thuggery.51 Unlike his counterpart, 48 Pelevin, The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, 95. For Alexander, Adele is also the name of the Enchantress from the PlayStation game Final Fantasy 8 that he cannot defeat (ibid., 74). 49 Unlike some foxes who believe the voices they hear belong to others, A Huli knows that all her inner voices are her own (ibid., 36). 50 “The mediation strategy . . . transforms explosive aporia into an explosive hybrid. It is such an explosive hybrid of postmodern and premodern (archaic influences of the image of the fox), of herself and the Other, of freedom and power (as a renunciation of power) that represents the personality of the cynical heroine” (Lipovetskii, Paralogii, 670). 51 Lipovetsky draws the parallel between Alexander Sery with the character Alexander Belov (Sery meaning grey and Belov meaning white) from the 2002 popular crime mini-series Brigada that takes place during perestroika and the wild early-1990s of post-Soviet Russia. Belov’s character is a former Soviet military officer turned criminal—Sery and Belov both share semi-official and semi-bandit statuses—the likes of which Giorgio Agamben compares with the concept of werewolf in his study of homo sacer. Lipovetskii, Paralogii, 646. See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 63; and idem, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004).

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the drugged-up and brutish Mikhalych, Alexander seems suave, sophisticated, and romantic. Yet over the course of the novel, Pelevin deflates Alexander’s heroic qualities through the character’s simplistic and dogmatic views that he forcefully imposes on his reality. This grown-up iteration of the boy Sasha from “A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia” is also a reappearing version of the apocalyptic five-legged dog, Pizdets, from Generation ‘П’ (1999)—the “natural final evolution of the werewolf in uniform.”52 Whereas Sasha’s initial transformation in “A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia” reads as an overall positive and enlightening development for the character, with only a few dark hints of violence and abuses of power (such as the association of werewolves with the Red Army and the Cheka), the mature version of Sasha sees these negative associations fully realized. Like the cynical trajectories of many heroes in Pelevin’s mature works, Sasha’s transformative experiences in The Sacred Book of the Werewolf are linked to his accumulation of power and exploitation of others.53 As with A Huli, Pelevin gives Alexander several speaking names that relay various qualities of his character. These are often hybrids or reveal two sides of the same being. A Huli nicknames Alexander “Shurik”— another nickname for Alexander, but also an allusion to Sharik, the dog-turned-man figure in Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog.54 A Huli and Alexander come to share obscene names that have alternate meanings in other linguistic contexts outside Russian. A Huli informs Alexander that pizdets, aside from being a Russian obscenity, is also the name of the fearsome five-legged dog from Nordic mythology, which is also known as Garm, the double to Fenrir, who comes after the apocalyptic events of Ragnarok. Alexander’s previous obsession with the powerful wolves of Norse mythology leads him to take the name Pizdets and “try and happen to something” in accordance with the name’s destructive associations.55 A Huli and Alexander are both metamorphic and powerful creatures, yet they perceive themselves differently in society and move on divergent paths. If A Huli is the mediator of multiplicities, and all were-creatures have the 52 Victor Pelevin, “Neskol′ko raz mne mereshchilos′, budto ia stuchu po klavisham lis′imi lapami.” 53 See, for example, the paths of Tatarsky in Generation ‘П’ and Roma Shtorkin in Empire V/ Ampir V, 2006. 54 A popular name for men in Russia, Alexander, shares its most famous referents with prominent men of power: the great national poet, Alexander Pushkin, and several tsars, most notably Tsar Alexander I, with whom A Huli directly compares Sasha’s likeness. Pelevin, The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, 69. 55 Ibid., 280.

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potential to act in this role according to their nature, then Alexander replaces mediation with the physical elimination of his opponent.56 Lipovetsky reads A Huli and Alexander, respectively, as Freud’s Eros and Thanatos, and offers cultural and political readings of them, where A Huli is the liberal progressive and eternal postmodernist and Alexander is a neoconservative modern Russian ur-fascist.57 A gender and sexuality reading uncovers several contrasts as well, where Alexander is a cis, heterosexual (and homophobic) male, and A Huli is a semi-androgynous, pansexual female. Racially, Alexander moves through modern-day Russia as part of the white majority, and A Huli’s Asian identity is minoritized. Significantly, then, Alexander is the “radical Other in relation to postmodern liberalism, opposing openness with xenophobia, deconstruction with a hard binary, and non-violence with the cult of power.”58 Thus, A Huli’s love for Alexander is not only the crux of a love story or even socio-political allegory, but Pelevin’s ultimate assertion that liberal consciousness—the mythological mediator—must always work to transform, however cynically, the consciousness of the Other.59

Howling for Oil In a key episode of the novel, Alexander exploits A Huli’s mediating capability to serve the state. He brings her up north on a secret operation to extract oil. The method for extraction fantastically involves moving an ancient cow skull to tears—Russia’s key export is bound in a mythology of death and pathos.60 Alexander enlists A Huli as an emotive catalyst who can transform the dry well into a fountain of oil and money. Morphed into a version of Little Khavroshechka (a Russian Cinderella figure), A Huli observes were-creatures wailing to the cow skull—the would-be tree that yields golden apples,

56 Lipovetskii, Paralogii, 646. 57 Ibid., 660–661. In Pelevin’s texts, werewolves are associated with the Red Army, and A Huli shares her experience siding with the Whites. Pelevin, The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, 200. 58 Lipovetskii, Paralogii, 660–661. 59 Ibid. 60 The brindled cow “is an important symbol evoking the ancestor cult and the cult of fertile earth” (Lipovetskii, Paralogii, 653). It must be moved to pity to enable oil to flow from the depth of the land. The governmental apparat (apparatus) that extracts oil is its own evolved and grotesque hybrid of state power. As Khagi notes, “Generation ‘П’’s ‘fat heavenly hulk,’ in its turn, becomes ‘upper rat.’ . . . “‘Upper rat,’ a bilingual pun on ‘apparat’ (the government apparatus), is another parasitic bio aggregate greedily feeding off the oil pipe.” Khagi, “The Monstrous Aggregate of the Social,” 452.

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signifying the cow’s sacrifice and love for the innocent Khavroshechka.61 She perceives her own howling as Alexander’s and her tears bring a flow of oil tears from the cow’s skull. A Huli simultaneously becomes little Khavroshechka, the cow, and the wolf—transforming the “scene of the spell into a moment of empathy.” As Lipovetsky notes, “for the first time in her life the fox fully accepts the Other by combining seemingly incompatible roles.”62

Khroshechka-Khavroshechka (Moscow: Izdanie Tovarishchestva I. D. Sytina, 1916). An illustration of the Khavroshechka fairytale. Even in death, the brindled cow of the tale helps poor Khavroshechka in the spirit of love and friendship. Pelevin uses the symbolism of the fairytale to craft the image of a mythic and sacrificial force behind Russia’s oil production. Public domain.

61 The tale of Little Khavroshechka as told by A Huli: “She was helped by a brindled cow. This cow did all the impossible jobs that Khavroshechka was given to do by her stepmother. The wicked sisters spied on Khavroshechka to see how she managed to keep up with all her work and they told the stepmother about it. The stepmother ordered the brindled cow to be slaughtered. Khavroshechka found out and told the cow. The cow asked Khavroshechka not to eat her meat and to bury her bones in the garden. Then an apple tree with jingling gold leaves grew out of the bones, and the tree made Khavroshechka’s fortune—she managed to pick an apple, and the reward for that was a fiancé.” Pelevin, The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, 206–207. 62 Lipovetskii, Paralogii, 653.

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The ritual with the cow skull is transformative not only as a morphed fairytale but as a symbol of the consistently violent and exploitative nature of state power that transforms Russia’s land and human bodies for its own purposes. Khagi reminds readers that these northern territories were once the site of the Gulag, the Soviet Union’s forced labor camps—a state network of repression, fear, and death.63 A highly symbolic field—the “Russian cultural substrate,” to borrow Lipovetsky’s term—is continuously transformed by the state to serve its will, and yet traces from previous iterations always remain. According to Khagi: Pelevin portrays a perverted mourning ritual in which not only is the guilt before the victims of the past not acknowledged but the victims of the Soviet era, and more generally, of the country’s consistently violent history, are exploited even as dead matter. Soviet people die, decompose, turn into an energy source. The metaphorical chain “oil is the past” is based on the analogy between natural and historical heritage, the riches of culture and memory, the meaning of history. Russia’s collective identity is up for sale.64

This is the ultimate evolution of the Petrine myth, the Great Tsar who drives Russia to progress cedes his throne: Peter becomes petroleum.65 A Huli’s unwitting part in this destructive trajectory suggests that all bodies, however magical and subversive, perpetuate suffering in life.

The Transformations of Love In The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, Pelevin suggests that the transformative power of love may offer an intervention to systemic and individual exploitation and destruction. As their relationship develops, A Huli and Alexander morph into a single creature through the sexual practice of joining their tails, which catalyzes a phenomenological connection between them. As an instrument of power, organ of consciousness, and a beautiful point of pride particular to their species, their tails, instead of the traditional anatomy, allow A Huli and

63 Khagi, “The Monstrous Aggregate of the Social,” 451. 64 Ibid., 451. Here Pelevin’s hybrid punning comes into play as, “Human beings and history literally metamorphose into ‘oil people’ [chelovekoneft′] and ‘oil money’ [neftedollary],”449. 65 Ibid., 439.

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Alexander to embark on a psychedelic, multi-sensory journey of mind, body, and spirit. Although their initial sexual encounters more closely relate to heterosexual human sex, by the practice of intertwining tails and watching films, those identity markers fall away as A Huli and Alexander take on the bodies and sexual situations depicted on screen. Sex is no longer constructed around a prescribed system of “how things should be” but becomes a playground for spiritual connection through multi-perspective pathways.66 By intertwining tails, A Huli and Alexander communicate, interact, and connect not with direct speech, but through the actions and speech of others—sometimes in unknown languages. For A Huli, the hybrid creature they create becomes the picture of love, which has less to do with fairytale romance or the various forms of human intimacy that are for sale and, instead, focuses on establishing a spiritual connection.67 Pelevin’s writing on the subject of love pushes the concept beyond its conventional bounds.68 By demonstrating the primacy of spiritual connection between beings as the truth of love, Pelevin’s most powerful prose crosses beyond the boundaries of the flesh. Despite the transcendent experience of joining tails, Alexander’s staunch traditionalism pushes him to treat this particular metamorphic act as transgressive. His disdainful term for the practice, “tailechery,” emphasizes his position as the uninventive mouthpiece of classic masculine homophobia, the party line, so to speak, in modern-day Russia. Alexander refuses to take on any identities in tailechery that would compromise his hetero-masculinity. He rejects the practice because it is something different and new, and not informed by what is supposedly culturally acceptable.69 Ironically, Alexander loses his capacity for traditional copulation after his transformation into a dog, and his instrument 66 Etkind notes that, “In the post-Soviet condition, the antimodern fantasy of immediate, extralinguistic communication becomes a popular refuge.” Here Etkind cites this phenomenon in another of Pelevin’s works: the telepathic powers held by vampires in Empire V. Etkind, “Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied,” 657. 67 Pelevin, The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, 231. 68 Take for example, Pelevin’s short story “Nika,” which is nothing short of a lyrical love elegy and devotion authored by a man about—the reader learns in the end—his deceased cat (Pelevin, “Nika,” 91–106). 69 Wilson aptly notes that “while A Huli remains an outsider and Sasha a crucial figure for the machinations of the state, both ultimately are similarly abject characters with zoomorphic and sexual perversions. This results in an absurdist unveiling of the hypocrisies of social conformity in post-Soviet Russia, where the only difference between an underage prostitute and an FSB officer is a state of mind.” Pelevin’s use of anthropomorphism “comments on the chaotic implications of individualism.” Wilson, “Nothing but Mammals,” 210–212.

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of love and source of virility turns into a set of claws—a weapon of animal brutality. To A Huli, who prefers to connect with Alexander through tailechery, the transformation of his penis to claws is no matter—although it clearly upsets Alexander, as if his whole identity was embodied in the physical symbol of his manhood. The power of his new identity, however grotesque, emboldens Alexander to believe he has transformed into the prophesied super-werewolf.

The Super-Wolf Metamorphosis The super-werewolf transformation that drives the plot of The Sacred Book of the Werewolf proves to be a malleable concept. It is subject to numerous interpretations that reveal how different characters perceive and engage supernatural power. Directly referencing Nietzsche’s concept of the übermensch (in Russian, sverkhchelovek), the idea of the super-werewolf (sverkhoboroten′) figures as a post-Soviet identity solution that takes the hybridized and bestialized nature of the subject to its ultimate phase.70 First introduced as a cult prophesy by Lord Cricket (the English aristocrat who falls prey to one of A Huli’s sisters), the super-werewolf will come into the world through the bodily transformation of a worthy subject. According to Lord Cricket, this powerful metamorphosis will take place in Moscow at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior—a temple of transformative potential that has been destroyed and rebuilt again.71 Despite Cricket’s demise (when he is murdered by his partner E Huli in the ecstatic moment of “transformation”) and A Huli’s explanation of Buddha’s teaching for were-creatures, Alexander nevertheless believes himself to be the super-werewolf once he assumes the identity of the dog Pizdets. Alexander’s thanatological impulses as Pizdets help him succeed in the physical and political path to power while A Huli follows the other fork in the path—the non-violent path of love that leads to physical and spiritual transcendence. The Rainbow Stream binds the subject in simultaneous becoming and entering. As the portal of the super-werewolf, its genius loci is Bitsevsky Park and not the Church of Christ the Savior as Lord Cricket divined. Unlike Moscow’s 70 See Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin Classics, 1974). Pelevin continues to write on the subject of übermensch in his 2006 vampire novel, Empire V, subtitled, A Novella about the Real Superman (Povest o nastoiashchem sverkhcheloveke). 71 The episode with Lord Cricket further divulges metamorphic linguistic play between categorical ordering: where God and dog are reverses of one another. Pelevin, The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, 171–186.

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rebuilt monument to the turbulent forces of political will and the relationship between church and state, the park symbolizes the liminal domain of foxes, straddling domestic and wild spaces. A flowing rainbow is a significant and recurring image in Pelevin’s writing and a symbol of transformation in Buddhist thought. The Buddhist concept of “rainbow body” (’ja’ lus) pertains to a final ascendent transformation (in death) wherein “the physical body dissolves into light when the adept reaches the final goal,” which may be attained through the practice of thod rgal (“crossing the crest” or the “leap over”).72 As Lipovetsky notes, A Huli’s entrance into the Rainbow Stream concretely demonstrates the “inseparable unity of the intellect, body, and emotion.” Her single being, whose path of mediation “triumphs over binary dogmatism,” becomes “the ultimate act of transgression in a world where transgression is normalized.”73 Pelevin’s characters who undergo final transformations akin to entering rainbow streams do so as an act signifying their enlightenment, spiritual resolution, or an escape from the world.74 A Huli’s transcendence is enabled by her relationship with Alexander, the radical Other to her mediating position.

Joining the Evolution: Predator or Prey? Characters like A Huli are born magical hybrid creatures. Some, like young Sasha from “A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia,” discover their were-identities as part of a thematic coming-of-age plot development. And others have these transformations thrust upon them, as in the case of Alexander as Pizdets and Roman in Empire V, who is kidnapped by a vampire and transformed accordingly. While these innate or attained metamorphic qualities are generally positive and pertain to the realm of fantasy, Pelevin clearly shows how the state also produces its own metamorphic systems and subjects: the buried dead of the Gulag become Russian crude oil, the government apparatus, the apparat, is revealed as the upper rat. What, then, happens when heroes of these works use the tools of the master to dismantle his house?

72 Robert E. Buswell Jr. and Donald S. Lopesz Jr., The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 715. 73 Lipovetskii, Paralogii, 669. 74 Most notably, the characters in Chapaev and the Void encounter and enter the Rainbow Stream URAL (the “Conditional River of Absolute Love”)—a Pelevinian revision of the historical death of Vasily Chapaev in the Ural River. Victor Pelevin, Buddha’s Little Finger, trans. Andrew Bromfield (New York: Viking Penguin, 2000), 308–310; originally published in Russian, Viktor Pelevin, Chapaev i Pustota (Moscow: Vagrius, 1996).

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Pelevin develops the metamorphic theme of the state’s forced transformation of its people in the name of progress and profit in his 2008 novella, The Hall of the Singing Caryatids (Zal poiushchikh kariatid). In this story, the ultimate fight to save the nation is the market-based task of keeping the oligarchs, their lavish spending, and exorbitant tastes entertained on domestic shores. “Our top national priority is a competitive edge on the market.”75 A job working at the elite sex club—a hybrid institution which doubles as an underground survival bunker—is likened to military service on a nuclear submarine in its critical function of safe-guarding the nation.76 Lena and her cohort work at the club in two-day shifts, posing as malachite caryatids who “come to life” and sing for clients, among other expected duties including sex acts.77 In order to sustain the statuesque pose for hours on end, the girls are injected with the drug “Mantis B” derived from the protein that enables praying mantises to remain still as a lure to their prey. Painted green and sedated under “Mantis B,” Lena’s first metamorphosis into a statue sends her into a meditative trance where she perceives herself on another spatial plane, posed in prayer with insect limbs. She communicates with a mantis mediator who shows her the ways of mantises. In these recurring sessions, Lena gravitates away from her identity as a singer in the club to the insect one she practices in her meditative state: “In the place where Lena was human, she was a false stone idol, working a long shift in one of the auxiliary spaces of an underground brothel. But in the place where Lena was a praying mantis, she was . . . well, that was where she was a real person.”78 Like Sasha’s feeling of being his truest self in “A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia,” the metamorphosis attained through the forced drug ironically offers Lena and her coworkers the greatest sense of being whole subjects, which is otherwise eroded through the 75 Victor Pelevin, The Hall of the Singing Caryatids, trans. Andrew Bromfield (New York: New Directions, 2011), 56; originally published in Russian, Viktor Pelevin, Zal poiushchikh kariatid, in P5: proshchal′nye pesni politicheskikh pigmeev (Moscow: Eksmo, 2008). 76 Lena notices the parallels between the underground club/bunker with those built by the Nazi SS in World War II. One such bunker which was built on the Eastern front (now in modern-day Ukraine), and, coincidental to the topic of this chapter, was codenamed “Werewolf.” The fascistic nature of the club is compounded and upended into kitschy joke by the character Uncle Pete's many shirts that pun on the subject. Pelevin, The Hall of the Singing Caryatids, 33–34. 77 Each entertainment scenario the club offers morphs the sex workers (male and female) into hybrid forms as mermaids and furniture, for example, or by mixing sexual organs. Presumably all this is accomplished with aid of government developed drugs and parallels Mikhalych’s use of ketamine to induce his wolf transformation. 78 Pelevin, The Hall of the Singing Caryatids, 42.

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dehumanizing experience of working at the club. This situation, where the abuse and ridicule that Lena and her coworkers endure is dismissed as “worth it” for the good pay, demonstrates the exploitation of the subject at the hands of wealthy and powerful men at the helm of a capitalist system tied to Russia’s authoritarian oligarchy.79 As we have seen, metamorphosis becomes the path for self-actualization and agency, yet here it reaches a dark and decisive conclusion. When an oligarch arranges to have sex with Lena, the mantis invites her to ‘go all the way’ in her transformation by enacting the post-coital ritual of mantis’ in nature wherein the female decapitates the male. Aware of her own transgressive status as a sex worker, Lena is asked to more seriously “transgress the bounds of human morals.”80 To convince Lena, the mantis uses the logic of the state, “Here, everything new and good always starts with some detestable crime.”81 Though violent and criminal, Lena’s transformation seemingly enables her liberation from a society that commodifies and controls her body for sex. “Although it was a bit painful, she knew the pain would disappear forever with the body.”82 As she sheds her human exoskeleton and is carried off by two helper mantises, readers may think back on the many “escapes” for heroes in Pelevin’s works. But this is the illusion in Lena’s mind. In actuality, she is carried off by police and the club owners spin the incident as a malfunction of the drug. The agency Lena attains through her metamorphosis as a mantis allows for spiritual liberation on another plane of consciousness while only changing the terms of her physical imprisonment in society.

Conclusion Unlike Lena and others who are bound to the earth, A Huli’s escape requires a physical exit and her agency on earth only remains in the teachings she leaves in her book. While primarily meant for other were-creatures, A Huli’s book also offers insights for tailless monkeys—her term for humans. In one passage, A Huli ponders the dilemma that the individual subject cannot end his existential pain by letting go of the grip he has on his own testicles—thus releasing him to 79 In order to receive their dosages of Mantis B, Lena and her coworkers must kneel naked and receive the shot in the back of the head. With this gesture, Pelevin fuses the violence of the state that creates an elite underground sex club with the history of mass executions at the hands of the same state: “Let’s pretend we’re at Katyn,” the doctor says. Ibid., 36. 80 Ibid., 89. 81 Ibid., 88. 82 Ibid., 105.

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the oblivion of nothingness—because he is in fact not the one gripping his own testicles but is instead locked in a conglomerated social biomass of hand-overhand testicle squeezing that binds humanity in mutually assured destruction.83 Unlike the numbness induced in this sadistic matrix of reality, Pelevin shows that feeling is the key to transformation. The most critical metamorphoses of The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, and other of Pelevin’s works, are triggered by emotions: fear, shame, desire, grief, and love. Not only is A Huli exempt from the above description of human suffering by virtue of her female anatomy, she also has a tail that uniquely functions as an organ of emotion. Perhaps all humans need, then, is a little evolution. When we consider metamorphosis as a leitmotif of Pelevin’s literary projects, we can easily see the significance of this concept beyond the superficial qualities of a text. As if metamorphs themselves, Pelevin’s texts involve hybrid attributes in terms of plot, genre, and language. His texts develop out of one another and reference other literary predecessors. They resist qualification and elude decisive conclusions. To author a book from the perspective of a were-creature, a female, and supernatural being, Pelevin shared that this task required a kind of metamorphosis of its author. Though not as fantastical as growing a pair of fox paws, the act of writing proves transformational in itself. This final metamorphosis, of thought into word, of spirit into literature, is what Pelevin offers us.

83 Pelevin, The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, 33–34.

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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 THEODORE TROTMAN, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

Utopianism, social and cultural experimentation, and . . . revolution open up new spaces and disclose endless vistas. . . . Revolution invites rebirth, cleansing, salvation. Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (1989)

V

ictor Pelevin’s S.N.U.F.F. (2011), a major work of post-Soviet literary fiction, shows literary fiction reclaiming the utopian dreams that were lost with the fall of the Soviet Union. In fact, the utopian myths of both the pre-revolutionary and Soviet periods remain the foundations of the post-Soviet era. Using this framework to address much of post-Soviet literary fiction—utopian in its forward gaze, mythic in its orientation to the past—can lead to a more cohesive and systemic understanding of its works. Despite the perceived waning of the utopian impulse and the failure of the Soviet experiment, utopian aspirations are still present though beset with uncertainty. These aspirations stem from a unique cultural history of utopian

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thinking and differ from the old Soviet dreams, even as they assign them new functions and bearing. Post-Soviet era writers are reimagining the genre of utopia. Instead of monolithic narratives, characteristic of traditional utopian fiction, contemporary utopias feature narrative polyphony and a diversity of perspective. Much like previous entries into the genre, works of post-Soviet fiction posit idealized visions, but these visions reflect the flaws of contemporary Russia, which lend the texts dystopic elements. The functions of such works, however, differ from those of well-known dystopias. While prominent post-Soviet works present predominantly negative visions of the future, recent publications suggest the resurgence of utopia beyond the ideological and cultural space constituted by the Soviet Union. The recent trajectory of literary fiction indicates that remnants of Soviet culture, in the form of its dreams and mythologies, have found new purpose and direction. Victor Pelevin is among the avant-garde of Russian writers today who appropriate the cultural memory of the Soviet-utopian experiment for the post-Soviet generation.1 His novels S.N.U.F.F. and Love for Three Zuckerbrins rekindle the utopian imagination to produce post-Soviet cultural forms. S.N.U.F.F. is neither traditionally utopian nor dystopian, but comprises a hybrid work that blends positive and negative utopian ideas with the cynicism, hyper-reality, and satire of postmodernism. Meanwhile, Love for Three Zuckerbrins proves to be a purely dystopian novel. These texts indicate that Russian utopian fiction is making a comeback. Russia’s postmodernist writers are making use of Soviet aspirations to produce a new idiomatic discourse in the genre of utopia. Pelevin’s text at once incorporates the dreams of Soviet life and presents its utopian vision in a postmodernist vernacular, suggesting that the author remains inspired by such visions, just not of the old Soviet variety.

S.N.U.F.F. and Soviet Utopian Fiction S.N.U.F.F.: A Utopia describes a world set several hundreds of years in the future. The novel details the reorganization of the world’s population by persistent large-scale warfare. The survivors occupy a land called Urkaina, a thinly veiled reference to Ukraine. The inhabitants are poor and uncivilized savages, called urks, who live in squalor and fear. The word urk both references the Russian slang term, urka, which connotes a practiced thief and the fictional Urkaina; it also recalls the barbaric, inhuman creatures known as orcs from 1 While other writers do utilize the memory of the Soviet Union to reimagine Russia’s future. Pelevin is simply among the first to create these new post-Soviet futurescapes.

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J. R. R. Tolkien’s popular Lord of the Rings series (1954–1955). These beings are the deformed warrior-slaves of Sauron, who fight against the more enlightened races of Middle-Earth. Indeed, Pelevin’s urks are also often referred to as orks in the text. The urks/orks are dehumanized and subjugated. They live in the literal shadow of this post-apocalyptic society’s privileged classes, its super-rich and establishment intelligentsia, who employ advanced technologies to sustain themselves on a floating platform, known as Byzantium, or Big Byz. Big Byz looms directly over Urkaina. It recalls the floating structure, called Laputa, in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726). It serves as an allegory for the distance that exists between the Russian government and the Russian populace. Pelevin’s decision to subtitle the novel, A Utopia, reflects sarcasm about the depicted society as representative of utopia, rather than pessimism about the possible realization of utopian dreams. This circumstance is borne out by the fact that the subtitle may also refer to the end of the novel, when Byzantium is no more and the Urkainian populace is newly free to pursue its own dreams. Definitions of utopia and dystopia will help here. Utopias depict an imagined, highly desirable or ostensibly perfect community or society, centered on an ideal or system of ideals.2 Dystopias portray the illusion of a perfect society, one that has gone wrong. This degeneration is inevitable in what I will call entropic (static) utopias, while it remains less common in kinetic (dynamic) utopias3. All that is necessary for the downfall of an entropic utopia is sufficient time for the monologic utopian ideal to devolve. In a kinetic utopia, this devolution requires a more robust form of ideological sabotage, because kinetic utopias are not organized around a single ideal. Soviet utopian fiction lays the groundwork for the special genre of utopia in the post-Soviet context and is the background, against which Pelevin is writing. The downfall of utopian society featured in S.N.U.F.F. is analogous to the disruption of the ideals of Socialist Realism that came about with the fall of the Soviet Union, in that both were the demise of a utopian model for society. They differ in scope, however, as the fall of the Soviet Union presaged the rise of the very type of arch-capitalist society that Pelevin warns against in the novel. 2 Despite their overtly dystopian tendencies, novels such as Zamyatin’s We and Pelevin’s S.N.U.F.F., live up to the name utopia, meaning “nowhere,” as an objectively perfect society cannot exist. Such novels also mean “no-when,” since their order cannot be sustained. They also can mean eutopia, “good place,” insofar as the term refers to the positive aspects of their imagined societies. All dystopias are utopian; while, the converse is not true. 3 See H. G. Wells, A Modern Utopia (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1967).

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Utopian thought manifested strongly in the genre of Soviet science fiction, whose futurescapes reflected the promises of Soviet leaders and were inscribed into mass culture by Socialist Realism. Soviet science fiction, with its utopian thought, is a treasure trove of futuristic visions and myths.4 The Soviet experiment, for the first time, opened a conceptual and practical utopian space. The past had been abolished in the crucible of revolution, and anything seemed possible in the Soviet cultural imagination. No longer did utopia describe some interminable and variously imagined nowhere; it had gained a concrete dimension. This development inevitably meant that, in the Soviet cultural imagination, the perfect society could no longer exist anywhere except within the utopian space of Soviet life. For literary fiction, this historical displacement gave rise to broad speculation in Soviet mass culture about what lived utopia would look like; it also heralded the end of traditional utopian fiction in its Russian context.5 Socialist Realism models a Soviet-utopian future.6 While individual works of Socialist Realism tended to illustrate particular elements of socialism, rather than produce complete visions of socialist society, Socialist Realism as a whole is a utopian aesthetic because it generated a cohesive vision of an ideal society in its canon. That vision is one of a perfect and flourishing Marxist-socialist society, replete with New Soviet men and women, in which everyone knows their role and is happy. This narrative dominated mass culture and displaced competing dreams. Not incidentally, this is precisely the narrative that Pelevin rejects in S.N.U.F.F., as the text depicts even the denizens of his “utopia” as living unfulfilled, sexually oppressed, and dreary lives. Thus, Pelevin’s text turns the Socialist Realist narrative on its head, as it depicts an abundant and flourishing arch-capitalist society, brought to ruin by its own monological ideal. In 1908, Alexander Bogdanov, an influential Bolshevik leader and political competitor to Vladimir Lenin, published a utopian novel, Red Star (Krasnaia Zvezda), followed by its 1913 prequel, The Engineer Menni (Inzhener Menni). Bogdanov’s novels posit fantastic visions of a possible future exemplified by a history of Mars. Both Red Star and The Engineer Menni incorporate negative elements into their futurescape, but these elements do not rise to the 4 It is important to separate sci-fi from utopia, because each genre possesses a unique genealogy and relationship with its formative myths. 5 Such as Vladimir Odoevsky’s “City without a Name,” in his Russian Nights collection, Evgeny Zamyatin’s We, and Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s What is to Be Done. 6 See Katerina Clark’s The Soviet Novel: History and Ritual (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1981).

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level of dystopia. Rather, they represent the inscription of common doubts in Russian culture regarding utopian experimentation, doubts that figure even in the works of key Bolsheviks. Such works set the stage for the imagination of literary dystopias in the years to follow. Red Star and The Engineer Menni are examples of what H. G. Wells called kinetic utopias.7 Their respective sociopolitical orders can adapt and evolve beyond the stasis of earlier entropic utopian models, in the tradition of Thomas More’s Utopia (1516). Multiple ideals can coexist within a kinetic utopia. These societies survive precisely because of the coexistence of multiple ideals; there is no monological system against which to rebel. This is the type of utopia found in the society of Urkaina, at the end of S.N.U.F.F., when the albeit externally imposed, monological ideal of “freedom” is finally eradicated, as the urks destroy Big Byz. Some might call this fact the attainment of Urkaina’s utopian ideal; however, it does not achieve this goal, because Big Byz and Urkaina are not independent systems. The fact that Urkaina frees itself from the externally imposed ideal of Big Byz makes it an example of kinetic utopia. Evgeny Zamyatin’s We (My, 1924) became a prototype of literary dystopia and a foil to More’s Utopia. We details the structure and functioning of a future, ostensibly perfect society, known as the One State. In this regard, the text resembles traditional utopias. But this society is ideal mainly from a utilitarian perspective. Every individual is assigned an alpha-numeric code in lieu of a name and serves a purpose. The protagonist, D-503, is the One State’s chief mathematician, who services its goal to disseminate the One State’s ideology to the stars. D-503 models the utopian Man. Among citizens of the One State, he is remarkable for his intellect and skills. Even so, he succumbs to the intrigue of imaginary numbers, and the existence of this imaginary domain becomes intolerable, as it increasingly dominates his thoughts. This development creates dystopia in the text, as the One State suppresses and, in extreme cases, excises imagination, forcibly transforming the individual into a function of the collective. The sociopolitical situation remains static, and so the novel is an example of an entropic utopia. Zamiatin defines entropy in We through the character of I-330: “There are two powers in the world—entropy and energy. One leads to blissful rest, to a happy equilibrium; the other—to the destruction of equilibrium, to tormentingly endless movement.”8 While this characterization of entropy may seem 7 Wells, A Modern Utopia, 75. 8 Evgeny Zamiatin, We, trans. Natasha Randall (New York: Modern Library, 2006), 144.

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positive, the impossibility of sustaining positive utopia in such an environment stems, in part, from what Joseph Brodsky called an “end of human thought,” a feature inherent in entropic utopia, where new modes of thought and innovation are systematically suppressed.9 Thus, entropic utopias gradually devolve into dystopias, as the static ideal proves incapable of sustaining the sociopolitical order.10 This is the variety of utopia found in the society of Big Byz in S.N.U.F.F., as it inevitably would devolve into dystopia if allowed to persist, because it is organized around a self-imposed monological ideal. The conception of revolution as a transcendence of the extant social order makes the Russian Revolution of 1917 a significant moment in the history of utopian literary production, one that grounds utopia in the Soviet experiment. While other revolutions also gave rise to social change and utopian dreams, the Revolution of 1917 possessed a vast transformative potential for Russian life. In his Revolutionary Dreams, Richard Stites expounds: Its [The Russian Revolution’s] pathos was deepened by the confluence of two remarkable facets of its history: the traditions of utopian dreaming and alternative life experiments that marked its past and the intersection of the moment of revolution (1917) with the swelling of the twentieth-century technological revolution. Russia’s was the first revolution to occur when both politics and technology were seen to be globally interlocked. The political side gave its international messianism a special force; its technological side added tremendous Promethean power to its visions and aspirations, releasing a much greater surge of futuristic fantasy than any previous revolution in history.11

Mass cultural products of utopian imagination not only bolstered revolutionary sentiment but also assimilated the event, shifting the trajectory of dreams about what could be. While 1917 inaugurated a surge in works of Russian futuristic fantasy, such works were unlike those of pre-Soviet utopian fiction, in that they were primarily kinetic. One prominent example is Aleksei Tolstoy’s Aelita (1923). The dystopian elements of this text come in the form of Martian   9 Evgeny Dobrenko and Marina Balina, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Russian Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 93. 10 I do not mean to imply that there is no such thing as a purely utopian novel. See note 2. 11 Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 3.

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capitalist society and its mode of resolving planetary crisis. The text reflects socialist utopian values and presents an example of how capitalist societies will come to ruin. Despite the text’s overtly dystopian thrust, Aelita is an example of early Soviet utopian dreaming. It sets an early precedent for S.N.U.F.F. since Pelevin’s novel also depicts a technocratic capitalist system and likewise portends the ruination of Western societies. Later examples of Soviet fiction evince the evolution of utopian dreaming. Ivan Efremov’s Andromeda Nebula (Tumannost′ Andromedy, 1957) shows a classic communist utopia set in the distant future. Though the world in the novel is ostensibly ideal, the text also describes conflict and its resolution through the voluntary self-punishment of a scientist whose reckless experiment proved harmful. The text describes a kinetic utopia, because its depicted society is not predicated upon any monological ideal; rather, it is based on multiple ideals. Kinetic utopias became a hallmark of Soviet utopian science fiction. In the final analysis, although the Socialist Realist aesthetic preferred kinetic utopias, on the whole, it constitutes an entropic model of utopia, one that embraces an unchanging, monological ideal.12 This helps explain its widespread rejection with the loosening of censorship in the late 1980s.

Utopia after Communism The Soviet Union’s collapse brought with it a reversal in the relative status of kinetic and entropic utopias. Entropic utopias like We became central in the social imaginary, displacing Socialist Realism and earlier kinetic utopias like Red Star and Aelita. No longer were entropic utopias and dystopias consigned to samizdat and tamizdat publications; they had gained an official platform for the dissemination of their competing visions of the future. Socialism was a utopian construct centered on revolutionizing human social organization. In this sense, the Soviet Union was an experiment in the creation of a utopian space. On one hand, Soviet science fiction was integral to the imagining of Soviet utopian futurescapes. On the other hand, the fall of the Soviet Union marked the end of utopia in the Russian cultural imagination and the futility of Soviet visions of the future. As a result, the post-Soviet historical 12 The publication histories of kinetic utopias such as Efremov’s Andromeda Nebula and Tolstoy’s Aelita, as compared with those of entropic utopias, such as Platonov’s The Foundation Pit (Kotlovan, 1987—completed in 1930) and Zamyatin’s We (first published in English in 1924 but not published in the USSR until 1988), demonstrate that Socialist Realism preferred kinetic utopias to entropic ones.

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and cultural space is also post-utopian. This does not mean that positive visions of the future are now impossible, but that those futurescapes posited in Soviet mass culture were imagined as part of a specifically Soviet world. While the production of a positive utopia in the post-Soviet context remains possible, the absence of any such utopian imagination is marked. The absence of a positive utopian imagination in the post-Soviet period can be attributed to the lingering influence of Soviet myths. Russian postmodernism’s appropriation of those myths to generate new discourse is replacing old Soviet narratives with contemporary alternatives. Thus, contemporary fiction has appropriated the discursive power of Soviet utopianism to produce post-Soviet dreams, which take on a positive charge from Soviet utopianism, though in modified form. In his Mapping Postcommunist Cultures; Russia and Ukraine in the Context of Globalization (2007), Vitaly Chernetsky contends that the rise of postmodernism in both Russia and the West resulted from “the waning of the utopian impulse.”13 Elana Gomel builds on this idea: “In the postcommunist world, the failure of utopia has become part of (mis)remembered history . . . Rather than suffering from amnesia, the Russian literary avant-garde seems to be in the grips of a post-traumatic stress disorder . . . obsessed with regaining history and time.”14 This obsession is partly responsible for the Russian postmodernist preoccupation with questions of identity and reality. Exploration of such topics has helped construct a new history for postcommunist Russia, free from the traumatic loss of its historicity, myths, and dreams. The material facts of Russian history are not misrepresented; rather, post-Soviet fiction helps make sense of postcommunist history, in part by reclaiming Soviet myths and dreams. In this sense utopian thought underlies all Russian postmodernism. While Gomel observes that “utopian disillusionment has been foundational to postmodernism,” literary fiction of the post-Soviet period evinces a renewed affinity with utopian thought.15

S.N.U.F.F.: An Analysis Pelevin appropriates utopian dreams lost with the fall of the Soviet Union to produce a new model for utopian fiction—one that has proven prophetic in 13 Vitaly Chernetsky, Mapping Postcommunist Cultures: Russia and Ukraine in the Context of Globalization (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007), 10. 14 Elana Gomel, “Victor Pelevin and Literary Postmodernism in Post-Soviet Russia,” Narrative 21, no. 3 (October 2013): 309, 321. 15 Ibid., 309.

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relation to today’s Russia, as well as reflective of its cultural myths. Despite its largely negative depiction of Russia’s future and the complete absence of commentary on Soviet history, S.N.U.F.F. also reflects Soviet dreams. Pelevin’s model recalls dystopian works such as Zamyatin’s We, which serves as commentary on the feasibility of a utopian society. Big Byz models Soviet aspirations such as state security, national self-isolation, and abundance. Pelevin’s society is affluent and has achieved both self-isolation and security, but has done so through a reign of terror. In Big Byz everything is hyper-real; life is not only comfortable but decadent. Social attitudes and morals are bourgeois, reflecting Western ideals imposed on the Russian futurescape. Big Byz lives up to the novel’s subtitle, A Utopia, since it presents a society similar to those depicted in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Zamyatin’s We, among others. The novel’s primary antagonist, Damilola Karpov, is a talented and intelligent pilot of a military drone. He lives in a luxurious apartment in Big Byz, where he has grown obese from a hedonistic and inactive lifestyle. Among his high-tech possessions is a female humanoid robot called Kaya. Kaya’s purpose is not only to provide sex but interpersonal intimacy and the spiritual satisfaction of her owner. Because of Big Byz’s advances in the psychology of human happiness, her artificially intelligent personality is set to the highest levels of “bitchiness, seduction, and spirituality” to best simulate human emotion.16 Kaya is a utility for Damilola as he struggles with self-identification and happiness. Kaya and her ilk are indispensable to the functioning of Big Byz, since the age of consent has been raised to forty-six. This situation, like many aspects of Big Byz society, occurs as the result of ideological hypertrophy and the domination of public discourse by special interests. Big Byz culture aggregates and compounds human suffering by overdeveloping the principal social ideals of its elites. The special interests seek social change in distinct areas of culture. Big Byz is thus a hyperbolic satire of Western civilization, or where it will end up if allowed to pursue its present course. Pelevin, in particular, satirizes the contemporary United States, drawing parallels between Byzantium and American cultures. Specifically, he targets American lobbyism and the American preoccupation with political correctness, along with the special interest groups that promote such discourse. Pelevin satirizes the American democratic process, depicting the legislature of 16 “U menia na predel'nykh polozheniiiakh stoiat odnovremenno ‘suchestvo’, ‘soblazn’ i ‘dukhovnost’.” Viktor Pelevin, S.N.U.F.F. (Moscow: EKSMO, 2012), 25.

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Big Byz as overrun with lobbyists, much like the American congress. He also mocks the mysterious connection between East and West that exists in the Russian cultural imagination, by naming of one of the official languages of Big Byz “Church-English.” Damilola’s function is surveillance of the Urkainian populace and the production of snuffs (Special News Reel/Universal Feature Film). Snuffs are the filmed invasions and slaughter of urks by remotely piloted drones, under the pretense of legitimate war, but in fact are a means of oppression. Indeed, the production of snuffs is the most important aspect in the maintenance of the utopian superstructure of Big Byz. As Masha Boston notes: “Snuff is that unavoidable and necessary blending of realms of reality and fiction that signifies the achievement of Utopia.”17 Despite the fact that the societies of both Big Byz and Urkaina are deeply flawed, Masha Boston recognizes that they both possess the hallmarks of utopia. These include, at least the façade of a flourishing society, an organizing ideal or set of ideals, and the means to improve itself. This final goal is attained, in the case of Urkaina, through rebellion and the vanquishing of their overlords. For Big Byz, it is done by means of the production of snuffs. The function of the production of snuffs mirrors that of Pelevin’s creation of a novel that blends reality and fiction to produce a utopian futurescape. While watching Damilola work, Kaya takes an interest in a young urk named Grym. Following a series of tragic events, Grym is offered the opportunity to start a new life in Big Byz. He travels there and is given a tour and an explanation of the organization of life, which is superficially ideal, as in works of classic utopian fiction. Grym soon meets and becomes infatuated with Kaya. Despite Damilola’s explanations that Kaya is not human, Grym falls in love with her. After much grappling with the notions of reality, self-identification, and love, Kaya abandons Damilola and Big Byz. At the end of the novel, having learned the structure and function of a better-organized society, Grym returns to Urkaina, where he is reunited with Kaya. A battle ensues, and Big Byz explodes, due to the insurgents’ sabotage of the anti-gravitational apparatus of the platform. In the end, Big Byz is no more, and only a fledgling utopia, Urkaina, remains.

17 Masha Boston, “Church-American in Victor Pelevin’s S.N.U.F.F.,” Transcultural Studies 6–7 (2010–2011): 145.

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S.N.U.F.F.: Kinetic or Entropic? S.N.U.F.F. comprises a bridge between entropic and kinetic utopian fiction. The effect of this confluence is the sharp contrast between Western inclinations, as modeled by Big Byz, and purely Slavic inclinations, modeled by Urkaina. Pelevin’s formulation allows him to present a hyperbolic satire regarding their respective fates. Nevertheless, Pelevin treats Urkaina with a far more favorable view. In S.N.U.F.F., the organization of Big Byz links the novel more closely to the entropic utopian fiction in the traditions of Thomas More and Evgeny Zamyatin than with kinetic utopias, like that of Alexander Bogdanov. The fact that Big Byz exists in the “Era of Saturation” (Era Nasyshcheniia), “when technologies and languages (both human tongues and IT codes) hardly change at all, since the economic and cultural meaning of progress had been exhausted,” indicates that entropy prevails.18 In contrast, the society of Urkaina is a kinetic world. At the novel’s beginning, the narrator explains the mechanics of Urkaina’s subjugation to Big Byz: We don’t even need to send any emissaries to them. It’s enough . . . to hint to the proud Orkish countryside that if the love of freedom should suddenly awaken there, certain people will be on hand to help. And then the love of freedom is guaranteed to awaken in this countryside, purely in the hope of making a profit–because the central authorities will pay the village elders more and more every day not to awaken completely, but the advance of history will be impossible to halter.19

The central organizing ideal of Urkaina is freedom, and it is precisely this desire for freedom that the discourse-mongers of Big Byz exploit to subjugate the urks. But, the tide of history cannot be indefinitely suppressed, a point, portending the future collapse of Big Byz and the advance of Urkainian culture. Pelevin allows the society of Urkaina to evolve in its own way, beyond the entropic model imposed by its literal overlords. This is not to say that ‘freedom’ is simply artificially staged by Big Byz for its own exploitative purposes; rather, it remains a genuine ideal in Urkaina, as evinced by its eventual overthrow of Big Byz and the subsequent attainment of freedom. 18 Pelevin, S.N.U.F.F., 71. 19 Ibid., 13.

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The problems of Big Byz, such as the age of consent, are not oppressive or totalitarian. Rather, they stem from the pursuits of human happiness, societal advancement, and democratic ideals. Individualism is not institutionally suppressed but is often rewarded, as in the case of Grym. The downfall of this utopian world results from its complacency. Given its oppression of the urks, Big Byz is ultimately doomed, as the apparatus that—literally and figuratively— elevates its residents above the lower classes, is destroyed. The urks remind their overlords of the undesirable but inexorable and indomitable elements of humanity. S.N.U.F.F. exhibits classic anti-utopian tendencies: Urkaina’s corrupt government, acts of state-sponsored violence, and the destruction of the ostensibly ideal Big Byz society point away from positive utopia. From an opposing point of view, the novel’s subtitle, A Utopia, also describes Urkaina at the end of the novel. The oppression has ended and the urks are free to pursue their own dreams for the future unencumbered by Byzantine idealism. The novel ends on a hopeful note, as Grym and Kaya are left with endless possibilities, newfound introspective awareness, and love, however unconventional. The apocalypse that befalls Byzantium spares a positive protagonist, untainted by the poshlost′ of Big Byz and its way of life. The novel closes with the demise of the entire dystopic superstructure, leaving the world a virtual tabula rasa for the establishment of a new, better society. Pelevin’s depiction of the social dynamic within and between Urkaina and Big Byz is uncannily resonant of recent political developments in Russia. On one hand, S.N.U.F.F. can be read as a stark illustration of the divide between Russia’s elite and its ordinary citizens. As Masha Boston notes in her “ChurchAmerican in Victor Pelevin’s S.N.U.F.F.”: “Urkaina’s explicitly corrupt government and its savage population is often read as contemporary Russia, while Big Byz appears either as a ‘promised land’ to which the poor savages would like to escape or a space where the Russian political and intellectual elite ‘hides’ from (its own) barbaric narod.”20 This reading of the text could be adjusted slightly to reflect Big Byz in a Western sense versus Urkaina as Russia or Eastern Europe, and the corrupt Russian elites who escape to the West to enjoy themselves.21 Pelevin does not simply satirize the society of Big Byz or disparage utopian dreams. He generates a cautionary vision of the future as an illustration 20 Boston, “Church-American in Victor Pelevin’s S.N.U.F.F.,” 144. The title of this piece at once references one of the official languages of Urkaina and the novel’s critical attitude toward the idealization of American culture. 21 Eliot Borenstein, “Off the Reservation,” in his Plots against Russia, http://plotsagainstrussia. org/eb7nyuedu2016/12/6off-the-reservation, accessed October 11, 2018.

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of Western influence on Russia taken to its extreme. The text rejects the superiority of Western values over traditional Russian ones.22 Big Byz might represent a Western cultural model superimposed on a traditional Slavic populace or may also be read as a realization of New Russian prosperity and its cost for the rest of society. Both readings of the separation of social classes in S.N.U.F.F. suggest renewed utopian dreams. One can also read the novel as Pelevin rewriting Zamyatin’s We for contemporary Russia, wherein Big Byz appears as an allegory of the One State, and Urkaina represents the space beyond the Great Wall, brutal and atavistic to be certain, but not without a certain freedom that, for Pelevin, is the sine qua non of Russian life. The fact that he relies on a famous anti-Soviet novel does not detract from the text’s Soviet-utopian heritage. The appropriation of Zamiatin’s We takes on the cultural memory surrounding that novel and, by drawing on its anti-Soviet tendencies, Pelevin bolsters his novel’s position vis-à-vis its Soviet utopian heritage.23

Love for Three Zuckerbrins: Another Pelevin Novel that Reimagines Utopia Common to post-Soviet fiction is a forward gaze. Many such works are either set in an imagined future or directly draw on the Russian dystopian tradition. One such novel is Pelevin’s Love for Three Zuckerbrins (Liubov′ k trem tsukerrbinam, 2014). This text draws on the Soviet past to paint pictures of Russia’s future; in fact, the post-Soviet era is so strongly defined by the Soviet past that this heritage defines it more concretely than its own attributes. But works of post-Soviet fiction tend to focus on Russian culture constantly trying to confront and shape its own identity, beyond its mooring in all things Soviet. That Love for Three Zuckerbrins is a dystopia is significant in the context of its production. Unlike S.N.U.F.F., a hybrid work of kinetic and entropic utopia that presents lingering hope for a positive utopian imagination going forward and a positive future for Russia, Love for Three Zuckerbrins extinguishes that hope. It is purely dystopian, not unlike the society portrayed in 22 Pelevin has been publicly vocal in his antipathy toward the Westernization of Russia. 23 This process is analogous to that, by which the Bolsheviks selected remnants of Imperial culture for appropriation into official Soviet culture. One notable example is the Chapaev myth. After the fall of the Soviet Union, there was no longer a Union of Soviet Writers. Therefore, all official designations of what was acceptable for publication vanished overnight. As a result, writers were at once free to publish what they wanted but they were bound to existing source materials for inspiration.

CHAPTER 8    The Mythic and the Utopian

Big Byz in S.N.U.F.F., if it had been allowed to persist ad infinitum. Love for Three Zuckerbrins points to the futility of a positive utopian imagination in the post-Soviet era, and portrays Russia’s future in the bleakest and most hostile manner possible. Pelevin shifts his tone in Love for Three Zuckerbrins, though it addresses familiar themes such as the elusive organization of the world, illusory realities, and technology. Julia Kuprina comments: “In the new, twelfth novel, obscene language, references to porn, malignantly altered advertising slogans, and biting comments on the current political situation do not look so much clever as sarcastic. The irony has turned into cynicism, and not provocative like everyone expected, but gloomy.”24 Each of these aspects can be found in Pelevin’s previous works: the references to porn in The Sacred Book of the Werewolf (Sviashchennaia kniga oborotnia, 2004); cleverly altered advertising slogans in Generation ‘П’ (1999); biting political commentary and obscene language run through all of Pelevin’s novels.25 What makes his use of these devices interesting in Love for Three Zuckerbrins is their cheerless deployment. This reflects a cultural environment less suited to Pelevin’s characteristic humor than that of the 1990s and 2000s.26 Pelevin has long produced text on “the windowsill,” as Alexander Genis describes, “the boundary between different worlds” that “underlines as well as creates difference.”27 In Pelevin’s latest output, one such boundary is that between the era of the 1990s to 2000s and the present. Whether the borders across which Pelevin projects his visions are visible even to him is less important than the prophetic quality of the resultant texts. Either way, his new tone may indicate a tipping point both in his production and in Russian literary aesthetics, in which specificity and historicity of the objects under examination are now more important than the texts’ universal resonance with readers. 24 Iuliia Kuprina, “V novoi knige Victor Pelevin ob”iasniaet, v chem smysl zhizni,” Delovoi portal “Kapital,” September 16, 2014, https://www.capital.ua/ru/publication/29487-retsenziya-na-svezhego-pelevina-knizhnaya-polka, accessed October 9, 2015. 25 With the conspicuous exception of Love for Three Zuckerbrins, especially given that in the previous year’s Batman Apollo (2013), Pelevin dedicates an entire chapter to Russian swearing styles. 26 Kuprina’s criticism indicates that perhaps literary critics do not view Russia’s recent upheaval as a cultural borderland between the post-Soviet and whatever comes after. 27 Alexander Genis, “Borders and Metamorphoses: Victor Pelevin in the Context of PostSoviet Literature,” in Russian Postmodernism: New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture, ed. Mikhail N. Epstein, Alexander A. Genis, and Slobodanka M. Vladiv-Glover (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015), 217.

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Love for Three Zuckerbrins remains less connected, than Pelevin’s previous offerings, to the Soviet past, except in its reimagination of Soviet utopian dreams, such as national self-isolation, state security, and the conformity of the individual to the collective will, or, in this case, consciousness of society. The title refers to Sergei Prokofiev’s opera The Love for Three Oranges (Liubov′ k trem apel′sinam, 1921). The “Zuckerbrins” of the title is a mashup of the last names of the creator of Facebook and one of the co-founders of Google. Pelevin is constantly on the bleeding edge of all the major trends in Russian society, and a great deal of attention in the novel is focused on that essential portion of life contemporary individuals spend online. Love for Three Zuckerbrins consists of three novellas written by their narrator, named Kyklops, and a story line that links them together. The main events of the dystopian future are framed by Kyklops’ narration, which is set in the present. They effect a completely different future world that appears to be  a satirical version of the Biblical paradise. The longest novella comprises a disturbing description of a future society, one that echoes George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), Alan Moor’s V. for Vendetta (1982-89), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), and, most significantly, the Wachowski siblings’ The Matrix (1999). The main character of this story in  the Matrix-like society is a man named Kesha, who was an incorrigible internet-troll in his previous life. The main action of the novel unfolds around alarming reports  of the Islamic cyber-terrorist, Batu Karayev, wreaking havoc to the matrix by sending viruses to the servers that maintain the collective dream of the cluster dwellers. The nightmares triggered by Karayev’s program are so powerful that many of the dreamers actually die when they experience them. This development satirizes the function of utopian dreaming, since now such dreaming can prove fatal in its prophetic power.28 The fact that these dreams are nightmares, however, does not detract from the novel belonging to post-Soviet utopianism, since dystopias are simply utopian societies that have gone wrong. The overall dream-focused premise of the novel is reinforced by the backdrop of the popular video game, Angry Birds. The birds in Pelevin’s fictional universe are the arch nemeses of the narrator Kyklops. They believe him to be an evil god and attempt to destroy him by deploying unsuspecting individuals. However, they cannot harm the narrator directly since they exist in an alternate 28 Much like S.N.U.F.F.’s prediction of events in Ukraine. This dreaming proved fatalistic, in that it painted in the cultural consciousness the idea that such events are possible, if not inevitable.

CHAPTER 8    The Mythic and the Utopian

dimension. The assassination attempts by the birds are depicted in a subverted, dreamlike Angry Birds manner, as the birds catapult various human beings at the green pig that represents the hateful creator, who is Kyklops. Pelevin’s inclusion of the Angry Birds dimension in his narrative captures some of the current zeitgeist, and he uses it to construct an alternative vision of Russian society today. The narrator, like so many of his predecessors in Pelevin’s works, is a font of secret knowledge. By following a meditative practice discovered in an esoteric reading, the man turns into a nearly omniscient being who can invade the thoughts of other humans and influence their actions.29 He becomes a Kyklops (a transliteration of Cyclops in the original Greek), a being of a higher order, whose primary purpose is to preserve balance in the world by preventing the occurrence of certain events that could cause catastrophic historical changes.30 In one of the first examples, the outcome of the recent coup d’état in Ukraine depended on whether a certain woman brought an umbrella with her to the Kiev subway. Considering the very recentness of many events mentioned in the story, this particular storyline evinces the myth-making power of Pelevin’s brand of postmodernism as he appropriates and reworks the Greek myth of the Cyclops to create his dystopian futurescape. Being on the cutting edge is a staple of any Pelevin novel. In the case of Love for Three Zuckerbrins, the riots in Kiev, the overthrow of President Yanukovych, and the subsequent annexation of Crimea by Russia have for the narrator the same topicality as for the readers. 31 Pelevin incorporates these events into his narrative, both despite and because they so recently entered Russian cultural memory. The quality of newsiness gets mixed in with the mythology Pelevin appropriates, such as Cyclops. The effect of this combination gives the text a mythic ambiance.

Conclusion Soviet mass culture produced myths that informed its people’s imagination of the future. The fall of the Soviet Union occurred abruptly and unexpectedly, and literary fiction had no chance to produce visions of a future without the state and its mythologies. With Soviet identity inextricably tied to the foundational myths of Soviet culture, after the collapse, writers frequently drew 29 Kuprina, “V novoi knige.” 30 Ibid. 31 “The Love for Three Zuckerbrins by Victor Pelevin,” The Untranslated, August 10, 2019, accessed December 15, 2019.

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on those cultural myths. When such discourse concerned the imagination of a Russian future, the resultant text featured an intersection of the old myths and utopia. This intersection indicated the limits of the Russian cultural imagination to produce visions narratively disconnected from the Soviet past. This is not to say that visions of a non-Soviet future were impossible in post-Soviet culture. Rather, visions of the future were largely informed by the failures of Soviet utopianism. In the years after the fall of the Soviet Union, the role of myth in fiction has evolved. Previously, writers relied on the myth-making apparatus, based in propaganda, and the monopoly on cultural products held by Socialist Realism. After the fall of the Soviet Union, its myths were appropriated and altered, creating new myths built on the remnants of Soviet culture. Post-Soviet utopias do not seriously posit ideal-type societies. Rather, they comment on the role of contemporary Russia in the generation of imagined futurescapes. For example, S.N.U.F.F. does not seriously advance either Big Byz or Urkaina as ideal futures but uses them to satirize aspects of contemporary Russian society. Therefore, one might rightly label it a satirical dystopia rather than a utopia. At the same time, the novel rides astride the resurgence of utopianism in contemporary fiction. Much as Russian writers appropriated Soviet myths to generate new discourses in the 1990s, this novel demonstrates how Soviet aspirations are leveraged to bolster the polemical mode in contemporary satire and dystopia. Visions of the future, largely disconnected from monological ideals, are replacing Soviet forms and speculative-revolutionary forms of pre-Soviet utopian imagination. The manner in which S.N.U.F.F. orients itself in relation to the Soviet past indicates that it is doing more than experimenting with a genre possessing a long history in Russia; it is also reformulating old Soviet utopian dreaming to adequately represent contemporary Russian life. The Soviet Union may have been a utopian space, but its dreams carry over into the Russian present. That Russia is now post-utopian to one degree or another does not preclude utopian imagination of the future. Both S.N.U.F.F. and Love for Three Zuckerbrins exemplify a confluence of traditional utopian dreaming and the prophetic power of Pelevin’s brand of Russian postmodernism.

Appendix

Select Publications by Victor Pelevin in Russian and English Select Original Russian Publications (in Chronological Order): “Колдун Игнат и люди.” Наука и религия 12 (1989): 29. “Затворник и шестипалый.” Химия и жизнь 3 (1990): 94–106. “Луноход: Отрывок из повести Омон Ра.” Знание-сила 9 (1991): 26–30. Синий фонарь. Москва: Альфа Фантастика, 1991. Омон Ра. Знамя 5 (1992): 11–63. Омон Ра. Повесть, рассказы. Москва: Текст, 1992. Желтая стрела. Новый мир 7 (1993): 96–121. Жизнь насекомых. Знамя 4 (1993): 6–65. Чапаев и пустота. Знамя 4–5 (1996): 27–121, 23–114. Чапаев и пустота. Москва: Вагриус, 1996. Чапаев и пустота. Москва: Вагриус, 1997. Желтая стрела. Повести и рассказы. Москва: Вагриус, 1998. Сочинения в двух томах. Москва: Терра, 1996. Generation ‘П.’ Москва: Вагриус, 1999. Собрание сочинений в 3 томах. Москва: Вагриус, 1999. Омон Ра. Москва: Вагриус, 2000. Жизнь насекомых. Москва: Вагриус, 2000. Желтая стрела. Сборник. Москва: Вагриус, 2000. “Затворник и шестипалый.” Москва: Вагриус, 2001. “Встроенный напоминатель.” Москва: Вагриус, 2002. ДПП(НН): Диалектика переходного периода из ниоткуда в никуда. Москва: Эксмо, 2003. Песни царства “Я.” Москва: Вагриус, 2003. Священная книга оборотня. Москва: Эксмо, 2004. Relics. Раннее и неизданное. Москва: Эксмо, 2005. Шлем ужаса. Креатифф о Тесее и Минотавре. Москва: Открытый мир, 2005. Все повести и эссе. Москва: Эксмо, 2005. Все рассказы. Москва: Эксмо, 2005. Empire V/Ампир В: Повесть о настоящем сверхчеловеке. Москва: Эксмо, 2006. П5. Прощальные песни политических пигмеев Пиндостана. Москва: Эксмо, 2008. T. Москва: Эксмо, 2009. Ананасная вода для прекрасной дамы. Москва: Эксмо, 2010. S.N.U.F.F. Москва: Эксмо, 2011. Бэтман Аполло. Москва: Эксмо, 2013. Любовь к трем цукербринам. Москва: Эксмо, 2014. Смотритель. Орден желтого флага. Железная бездна. Москва: Эксмо, 2015. Лампа Мафусаила, или Крайняя битва чекистов с масонами. Москва: Эксмо, 2016.

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Companion to Victor Pelevin iPhuck 10. Москва: Эксмо, 2017. Тайные виды на гору Фудзи. Москва: Эксмо, 2018. Искусство легких касаний. Москва: Эксмо, 2019. Непобедимое солнце. Москва: Эксмо, 2020. Transhumanism Inc. Москва: Эксмо, 2021.

Select English Translations (in Chronological Order): Omon Ra: With the Novella “The Yellow Arrow.” Translated by Andrew Bromfield. London: Harbord, 1994. ____. Translated by Andrew Bromfield. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1996. Omon Ra. Translated by Andrew Bromfield. New York: New Directions, 1998. The Life of Insects. Translated by Andrew Bromfield. London: Harbord, 1996. ____. Translated by Andrew Bromfield. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998. The Yellow Arrow. Translated by Andrew Bromfield. New York: New Directions, 1996. The Blue Lantern and Other Stories. Translated by Andrew Bromfield. New York: New Directions, 1997. A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia and Other Stories. Translated by Andrew Bromfield. New York: New Directions, 1998. The Clay Machine-Gun. Translated by Andrew Bromfield. London: Faber & Faber, 1999. Buddha’s Little Finger. Translated by Andrew Bromfield. New York: Viking, 1999. Babylon. Translated by Andrew Bromfield. London: Faber & Faber, 2000. 4 by Pelevin. Translated by Andrew Bromfield. New York: New Directions, 2001. Babylon. Translated by Andrew Bromfield. London: Fiber and Fiber, 2000. Homo Zapiens. Translated by Andrew Bromfield. New York: New Directions, 2002. The Helmet of Horror: The Myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. Translated by Andrew Bromfield. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2007. The Sacred Book of the Werewolf: a Novel. Translated by Andrew Bromfield. New York: Penguin Books, 2009. The Hall of the Singing Caryatids. Translated by Andrew Bromfield. New York: New Directions, 2011. S.N.U.F.F. Translated by Andrew Bromfield. London: Gollancz, 2015. Empire V: The Prince of Hamlet. Translated by Anthony Phillips. London: Gollancz, 2016.

Index A

Aksakov, Sergei, 169 Aksyonov, Vasily, 6, 132-33, 149 Akunin, Boris, xvii America. See United States Arendt, Hannah, 155, 156n104 Arkhangelsky, Andrei, 157 Auschwitz-Birkenau, 155

B

Bakhtin, Mikhail, 15, 18, 26n11, 30n25, 39n55, 170, 175 Barta, Peter, 162, 172n40 Baudrillard, Jean, xxvi, xxxii, 37, 38n49, 38n51, 49n83, 77-79, 107-8, 111-16, 118, 120-21, 126 Bely, Andrei, 81 Berg, Mikhail, xxii, Beslan, ix Bisinsky, Pavel, 144 Bitov, Andrei, 6 Bogdanov, Alexander, 189, 196 Bogdanova, Olga, 10 Borenstein, Eliot, xxviii, xxixn56, 123 Brintlinger, Angela, xxiv-xxv, 24, 54, 86 Bromfield, Andrew, 26n12, 58n15, 64, 94n71, 94n74, 123, 127n1, 133n27, 152n90 Brooks, Jeffrey, 79 Bulgakov, Mikhail, 15, 33n30, 52, 81, 92, 100n93, 170, 176 Bunin, Ivan, 9 Burke, Peter, 79 Bush, George H. W., viii, xvii Bykov, Dmitry, xx-xxi

C

Castaneda, Carlos, vii Chaadaev, Pyotr, 144 Chapaev, Vasily, 55, 85 Che Guevara, 130 Chekhov, Anton, 143-44, 150-51 Chernetsky, Vitaly, 193 Chernyshevsky, Nikolai, xxii, 57-59, 128n3

China, 167, 172 Chitnis, Rajendra, 2, 17, Clark, Katerina, 4-5, 62 Clowes, Edith, xxiv-xxv, 6, 25, 37n44, 66n39, 68n43, 71-72, 86 Cook, Deborah, 113 Coupland, Douglas, 114 Crimea, 153n96, 201 Czechoslovakia, vii

D

Dalton-Brown, Sally, 8n18, 114, 116, 118-20, 157 Debord, Guy, xxii, 107-111, 113-16, 118 Deleuze, Gilles, xxii, 107, 118-20 Dobrenko, Evgeny, 129, 136 Dostoevsky, Fedor, xix, xxix, 81, 95-96, 100n93, 137-38, 146-48, 152, 162n6, 171n36 Dralyuk, Boris, 79 Dugin, Alexander, xxv, 68n43, 71-72

E

Efremova, Zinaida, x Efremov, Ivan, 192 Eichmann, Otto Adolf, 155-56 Epstein, Mikhail, 77 Erofeev, Venedikt, 6 Etkind, Alexander, xxvii, 154, 156n105, 180n66

F

Fadeev, Aleksandr, 60 Fitzpatrick, Sheila, 88, 89n57, 90, 92 Florensky, Pavel, 26n11, 51n90 Fort, Christopher, xxxii Freud, Zigmund, xxxi, 25, 32-35, 64n34, 177 Frye, Northrop, 130 Furmanov, Dmitry, xxxii, 24n1, 55, 60-67, 74

G

Genis, Alexander, xx, 6, 19, 50, 54, 63, 163-64, 165n18, 199

206

Companion to Victor Pelevin Girkin (Strelkov), Igor, 79-80 Gladkov, Fyodor, 7, 60-61 Goethe, Johann Wolfgand von, 100 Goffman, Erving, 89 Gogol, Nikolai, 30n25, 39n55, 81, 151-53, 162n6 Gomel, Elana, xxvii, 24, 26n10, 86, 193 Gorbachev, Mikhail, vii, viiin1, ix, 138 Gorky, Maxim, 13, 15, 17 Govorkov, Viktor, 59-60 Goya, Francisco, 140 Griboedov, Alexander, 140 Guattari, Félix, xxxii, 107, 118-20

H

Haimson, Leopold, 87 Heidegger, Martin, 29n22 Hollywood, 37-38 Hutchings, Stephen, xxv Huxley, Aldous, 152n92, 200

I

M

Maresiev, Alexei, 5, 10, 14-15, 17 Marx, Karl, 145 Mason, Fran, 123 Massumi, Brian, 118 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 61n25, 92, 144, 146-49 McConnell, Alexander, xxxii Mahoney, Grace, xxxii Makanin, Vladimir, xxiv, 54 Marcuse, Herbert, xxvi, xxxii, 107, 116-18, 121-22 Martin, Michael, xxxi Mongolia, Inner, xiv, xx, xxiv, 27, 39n54, 49, 52, 55, 65, 72, 97 Moor, Alan, 200 More, Thomas, 190 Moscow, x-xi, xiv, xvi, xxviii, 2, 16, 24, 27-30, 34, 37, 39-41, 49, 81, 83-86, 92, 96, 107, 126, 135, 154, 168, 181

N

Jameson, Fredric, xxxii, 107, 122-23, 125

Nabokov, Vladimir, 9, 171 Nemzer, Andrei, xxi Nietzsche, Friedrich, xxxi, 25-30, 181 Noordenbos, Boris, xxv, 25, 112-13, 126 Novikova, Liza, 165

K

O

Ivashkiv, Roman, 130

J

Kant, Immanuel, 25n9, 42-44, 66n39 Kashin, Oleg, 79 Kataev, Valentin, 7 Khagi, Sofya, 56n10, 76, 107, 112, 122, 143n55, 152n92, 164n14, 165, 177n60, 179 Khapaeva, Dina, xxvii Kiev, 201 Kotovsky, Grigory, 39n54 Krylov, Ivan, 144 Kuliapin, Aleksandr, 56, 60 Kuprina, Julia, 199

L

Laruelle, Marlene, 72 Latin America, 38 Lenin, Vladimir, xii, 57, 59-61, 81-82, 84, 85n41, 95n75, 98, 100, 132-33, 149, 189 Lipovetsky, Mark, xxvi, xxix, 6, 50, 55, 78, 112, 129-30, 136, 154, 163, 171n36, 174-75, 177-79, 182 Livers, Keith, xxvii, xxix, 123-25 Lotman, Yury, 26n11, 30n25, 38n52, 39n55, 43n63, 51n90

Ogden, Dylan, xxxii Orwell, George, x, 152n92, 200 Ostrovsky, Nikolai, 15-17, 60 Ovid, 172n40

P

Pasternak, Boris, 15, 135 Parts, Lyudmila, xxv, 131-32, 144 Pelevin, Oleg, x Pelevin, Viktor “Anti-Aircraft Codices of Al-Efesbi” (“Zenitnye kodeksy Al’-Efesbi”), xvii, 158 Blue Lantern, The (Sinii fonar’), xii, xx, xxxi, 2-4, 10, 14-15, 18, 20, 22, 158 “Blue Lantern, The” (“Sinii fonar’”), xii, 11n29 Buddha’s Little Finger, xiv, 21, 53 Chapaev and the Void (Chapaev i pustota), xiv, xviii, xx-xxii, xxiv-xxvi, xxix, xxxixxxii, 24-103, 116, 129n9, 182n74 “Crystal World, The” (“Khrustal’nyi mir”), xii, 8, 81, 84, 91, 98, 158

Index DPP(NN): The Dialectic of the Transitional Period from Nowhere to Nowhere (DPP(NN), xv, xvinn16-17 Empire V/Ampir V: A Novella about a Real Superman (Empire V/Ampir V: Povest o nastoiashchem sverkhcheloveke), xvi, xxii, xxviii, xxxiixxxiii, 38n48, 78, 82n34, 124-25, 152n91, 153-56, 180n66, 182 Generation ‘П’ (1999), x, xvi, xxii, xxv, xxviii, xxxi-xxxiii, 21, 38n51, 46n69, 78, 106-158, 176, 177n60, 199 “Greek Version, The” (“Grecheskii variant”), 80, 83-85 iPhuck 10, xix, 21 Hall of the Singing Caryatids, The (Zal poiushchikh kariatid), xxxiii, 172n38, 183 “Hermit and Six Toes” (“Zatvornik i shestipalyi”), xi, xiin12, 8, 163, 164n14 “Life and Adventures of Shed Number 12, The”, xiin12, 8-9 Life of Insects, The (Zhizn’ nasekomykh), xiii, xx, xxxi, 11, 13, 20-21, 164 Love for Three Zuckerbrins (Liubov’ k trem tsukerbrinam), xviii, xxiin29, xxix, xxxiii-xxxiv, 40n57, 186-87, 198-202 “Macedonian Critique of French Thought, The” (“Makedonskaia kritika frantsuzskoi mysli”), xvi, 78n14 “Mid-Game” (“Mittel’shpil’”), xii, 8, 163 “News from Nepal” (“Vesti iz Nepala”), 6, 8 “Nika”, 8, 22, 163 Numbers (Chisla), xvi Omon Ra, xiii, xx-xxi, xxxi, 2-4, 15-22, 55, 154n97 “Operation ‘Burning Bush’” (“Operatsiia ‘Burning Bush’”), xvii Pineapple Water for the Beautiful Lady (Ananasnaia voda dlia prekrasnoi damy), xvii, 51n89, 158 “The Prince of Gosplan” (“Prints gosplana”), xii Sacred Book of the Werewolf, The (Sviashchennaia kniga oborotnia), x, xvi, xxvi, xxviiin50, xxixn54, xxxiii, 48n77, 55n8, 66n38, 67n42, 92n67, 111n14, 116, 153n93, 160-85, 199

“Sigmund in a Café” (“Zigmund v kafe”), 163 S.N.U.F.F., xviii, xix, xxiiin32, xxix, xxxiii, 38n51, 158, 186-202 “Sorcerer Ignat and People” (“Koldun Ignat i liudi”), vii, ix, xin10 “Tambourine of the Upper World, The”, 12-13 “Vera Pavlovna’s Ninth Dream” (“Deviatyi son Very Pavlovny”), xii, 56-57 Warden, The (Smotritel’), xix, xxvin45 “Werewolf Problem in Central Russia, A” (“Problema vervolka v srednei polose”), xxxiii, 165, 168, 176, 182-83 Yellow Arrow, The (Zheltaia strela), xiii, xx, 17n50, 21, 40n57 Picasso, Pablo, 140 Platonov, Andrei, 6 Polevoi, Boris, 5, 15, 153 Prokofiev, Sergei, 200 Pushkin, Alexander, 28-30, 140, 144, 162n6, 170, 172n40, 176n54 Putin, Vladimir, ix

R

Rodnyanskaya, Irina, xx Rokem, Freddie, 76-77, 84-85 Romania, vii Russian Federation, 88

S

Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 37-38, 68-69 Seem, Mark, 119 Shaitanov, Igor, xxi Shakespeare, William, 93, 94n74, 143, 145 Shevchuk, Yuri, 138-40 Skubach, Olga, 56, 60 Sologub, Fyodor, 81 Sorokin, Vladimir, xx, 6 Soviet Union, ix, xin9, xiv-xv, xxv, xxvii, 2-3, 5, 10, 21, 53-54, 56, 58, 69-71, 73-74, 88, 123, 149n78, 153n96, 163, 179, 186-88, 192-93, 198n23, 201-2 St. Petersburg, xin10, 8, 27, 41 Stakun, Rebecca, 24, 78, 86 Stalin, Josef, xvii, 53, 56, 58-60, 71 Stepanov, Andrei, 72 Strugatsky, Arkady and Boris, ix, xii Swift, Jonathan, 188, 194

207

208

Companion to Victor Pelevin T

Tolkien, J. R. R., 188 Tolstoy, Aleksei, 174n47, 191 Tolstoy, Leo, xvii, xxii, 41, 156, 162n6 Trotman, Theodore, xxxiii Tyutchev, Fedor, 142

U

Ukraine, xviii, 41n58, 79-80, 183n76, 187, 200n28, 201 Ungern von Sternberg, Baron, 39n54, 72 United States, xvii, 13, 69, 164, 194 Urban, Michael, 88 USSR, xx, xxvii, 15, 53, 72n56, 77, 87-88, 13132, 136, 138-39, 141, 149n78, 152, 192n12

V

Vaingurt, Julia, xxviii, 56n9

Velasquez, Diego, 140 Vicks, Meghan, xxxiii, 115-16, 126 Vogüé, Eugène-Melchior de, 152

W

Wachowski siblings, 200 Wells, H. G., 190 White, Hayden, 78

Y

Yanukovych, Viktor, 201 Yeltsin, Boris, ix, 68, 70, 74, 145-46, 148, 150

Z

Zamyatin, Evgeny, 6, 152n92, 190, 194, 196, 198 Žižek, Slavoj, 120