Pelevin, Viktor Olegovics (Пелевин, Виктор Олегович) (1962–) Works Bibliography   hu ru

Biography

Pelevin, Viktor (1962-)
Novelist, Story Writer. Active 1989- in Russia, Continental Europe
Viktor Pelevin is undoubtedly the best known fiction writer to have emerged in Russian literature since the fall of the Communism. In a series of novels and short stories published in the 1990s he captured the zeitgeist with his exuberant satire of Soviet and post-Soviet society. His works are couched in the trendy language of Western postmodernism, science fiction, as well as pop-Buddhism, Eastern mysticism, Japanese Manga comics and ironic-nostalgic Socialist Realist parody, but consciously in the tradition of Nikolai Gogol and the 1920s avant-garde. At the same time, the publication history and reception of his work to date (August 2005) epitomises the shift in Russian literary culture from a journal- and critic-led process to a consumer-led market.
Pelevin is one of the few writers who have contrived, at least for a time, to combine runaway commercial success with critical acclaim. He has won many prizes, including Russia’s Little Booker for his first short-story collection in 1992 and the National Bestseller Prize in 2003. His 1990s fiction has been translated into English (and most major languages) with critical and some commercial success. Pelevin cannot, however, be accused of “writing for the West”, and his fiction presents a challenge to the Western reader unfamiliar with Russian, Soviet and post-Soviet culture, and the reception of American popular culture in Russia, and to the translator seeking to convey these cultural references, the frequent in-jokes and appalling Anglo-Russian puns.
Viktor Olegovich Pelevin was born in Moscow on November 22nd 1962. His father was an army officer and his mother was an economist. He trained to be an engineer at the Moscow Energy Institute, where he also began postgraduate studies while attending seminars at the Literary Institute. Symptomatically of the peculiar publishing conditions of the glasnost’ period, his first short story came out in 1989 in the journal Nauka i religiia [Science and Religion], with others appearing in Khimiia i zhizn’ [Chemistry and Life], before the publication of a volume of twenty-one stories, entitled Sinii fonar’ [The Blue Lantern], in 1991. (The 1997 English translation of the same title contains only eight of these, with a further eight contained in A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia, published the following year.) The success of this collection enabled Pelevin to break into the major literary journals, especially Znamia [The Banner], which published his first two novels – Omon Ra (1992) and Zhizn’ nasekomykh [The Life of Insects, 1993] – and briefly enjoyed a return to glasnost’-period circulation levels when it published his third, Chapaev i Pustota [Chapaev and Emptiness, translated into English as both The Clay Machine Gun and The Buddha’s Little Finger] – in 1996. The Booker Prize jury, however, either regrettably demonstrated the enduring conservatism of the literary establishment or commendably resisted the hype by failing even to short-list the novel. Reflecting both the establishment of a commercial market and the nature of Pelevin’s generally young, non-journal-reading audience, Pelevin’s subsequent books – Generation P (translated as Babylon, 1999), Dialektika perekhodnogo perioda iz Niotkuda v Nikuda [The Dialectics of the Transitional Period from Nowhere to Nowhere, 2002] and Sviashchennaia kniga oborotnia [The Sacred Book of the Contrarian, 2004] – came out first in book form.
Pelevin’s work was initially received by commentators in the context of the aesthetics of Vladimir Sorokin (born 1955) and his fellow Moscow Conceptualists, a group of formerly underground artists and writers who, inspired by pop art and post-structuralist theorists like Jean Baudrillard, sought in their work to empty Soviet propaganda images and rhetoric of meaning, or expose their meaninglessness. As Sergei Kostyrko indicates in a 1992 article, by the time Pelevin’s fiction appeared, critics had grown tired of the repetitive, gratuitous destructiveness of the Conceptualists’ work, which seemed inextricably bound up in the Soviet ideology and art that it sought to deconstruct, and saw in Pelevin a writer who could use similar techniques to break free of this dependence. This artistic approach is encapsulated in Chapaev’s advice to his disciple, Pet’ka, in Chapaev and Emptiness: “Wherever you find yourself, live by the laws of the world in which you’ve ended up, and use these laws to free yourself from them”. In Zheltaia strela [The Yellow Arrow, 1993], Pelevin explicitly makes fun of Conceptualist artists and their willingness to sell their services to what he sees as the new propaganda of commercial advertising.
The critical weariness with Conceptualism reflected not only that its methods had grown stale, but also that its proponents, ubiquitous and provocative in the cultural press, appeared to have become as didactic about art as had been the Soviet ideologues they sought to undermine. Commentators like Sergei Chuprinin and Sally Dalton-Brown perhaps betrayed their aspirations for the future of Russian fiction by mistakenly crediting Pelevin with a lack of didacticism and an emphasis on literature as pure entertainment. Viacheslav Kuritsyn argued that Pelevin’s fiction signalled the emergence of a new post-Soviet middle-class readership, and he linked the euphoria in 1996 surrounding Chapaev and Emptiness to the sense of optimism and triumph among that social group after Boris Yeltsin’s victory over the Communists in the presidential election that year.
Pelevin’s success among the so-called “new Russian” entrepreneurial class and younger urban-based Russians, best placed and keenest to exploit the Westernisation and commercialisation of Russian society, is paradoxical, since it is precisely the unthinking acceptance of a medialised market ideology that Pelevin satirises in his fiction, especially in The Life of Insects and his subsequent books.
In a 1997 article focusing particularly on Chapaev and Emptiness, Sergei Kornev finally drew attention to the barely concealed didacticism in Pelevin’s fiction, which, instead of the bleak, debilitating “Western” emptiness of the Conceptualist impossibility of meaning, asserts the “Eastern” blissful emptiness of Nirvana, in which the material is nothing and the spiritual everything. Commentators subsequently became more critical of Pelevin, beginning with the appearance of Generation P, where, despite the brilliant depiction of Russian public life as the creation of a media organisation, Pelevin’s satire loses its warmth, reflecting perhaps the jaded national mood, or a frustration with Russia’s failure to listen, and his didacticism becomes more overt and confrontational. Though some critics do continue to enjoy Pelevin’s imagination and humour, many now suggest that he has “sold out”, giving his readers what they want in terms of none too subtle satire (in his latest novel, the fox-tailed prostitute named Akhuli – perhaps best translated as Y-Da-Fk – is a particular low point), while indulging his increasingly repetitive personal mysticism.
At a seminar in London in 1998, the leading Conceptualist spokesman Dmitrii Prigov asserted that Pelevin could not be compared with the Conceptualists because he belonged to a different generation. Most clearly perhaps in Omon Ra, Pelevin writes from the perspective of the generation growing up in the last decades of the Soviet regime – sucked in by the space race, too young to understand the malevolence of the Soviet system, sensing its tawdry, crumbling nature, but playing no active role in its collapse. As a result of such naivety, surviving the regime is presented as a lucky escape that becomes an opportunity to change one’s whole approach to life. As Pelevin depicts the situation in each of his next three novels, his central characters, reluctant to imprison themselves in the new materialist ideology of Western market economics, embark on a journey to enlightenment and a completely different understanding of identity, existence, time and space.
This understanding draws simultaneously on Oriental religion and on linguistic theory; in Pelevin’s fiction, just as the self is freed from the physical body, so the signifier is freed from the signified to roam in simultaneously existing universes. For example, in Pelevin’s most expansive and persuasive exposition of his worldview, Chapaev and Emptiness, Chapaev simultaneously signifies the local Red Army commander of history (the hero of Furmanov’s pre-Socialist Realist novelistic reportage Chapaev, 1923), the hero of the subsequent film, the hero of many Russian jokes, and a Buddhist teacher. Where in Conceptualism the signifier implodes, in Pelevin it explodes into multiple existences. Characters in Pelevin are therefore capable of existing simultaneously or successively in different forms and at different times, and a chosen few learn to detach themselves from these existences, observing them as though from a single mind or being, and thus escaping drab, grubby material reality for a higher plane. Pelevin prefers what A. Genis calls the “border-reality” inhabited by children and schizophrenics, where identities are unstable and all creative possibilities remain, to the imprisonment in a single, mortal, material and materialistic self favoured by adults and the supposedly sane. In Chapaev and Emptiness, set during the post-Revolutionary Civil War, the narrator contrasts the revolutionaries with some children skating:
While all the idiot adults were busy reconstructing the world they have invented, children continued to live in reality, amid the snowy hills and sunlight, on the black mirrors of frozen reservoirs and in the mystical silence of nocturnal, snow-covered yards. And although these children were also infected with the germ of madness which had attacked Russia […] all the same the memory of something I had long forgotten still shone in their clear eyes; perhaps it was the unconscious recollection of the great source of all that exists, from which they, while descending deeper into the shameful desert of life, had not yet had time to become too distanced. [translation mine: R.C.]


Rajendra Chitnis, University of Bristol.
"Pelevin, Viktor." The Literary Encyclopedia. 9 Jun. 2005.
The Literary Dictionary Company. 18 November 2005.
http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=5589