Genius Temporis

You cannot understand Russian literature of the past 15 years without reading Victor Pelevin. The popular author has spawned many pale imitators, but none have even been able to bask in his reflected glory; they have slowly melted away, unwanted. Pelevin is unique in Russia. And no one else is needed.

An intellectual writer focusing on the dark and the bizarre, Pelevin, along with mystery writers Boris Akunin and Darya Dontsova, is among the troika of Russia’s best selling authors. His books fly off the shelves by the million; even the sketchiest rumor of a new Pelevin novel mushrooms into a Russia-wide sensation.

A hermit who for years has refused interviews and ignored high-society gatherings (including those held in his honor), Pelevin is one of the Russian cultural elite’s most recognizable figures. This despite the fact that the public has seen no more than a dozen photographs of him (of which only two show him sans dark glasses), and that he has given fewer interviews than could be counted on the fingers of one hand (he categorically refuses to appear on television).

Pelevin visits Moscow only infrequently and briefly – he is rumored to spend most of his time in the Far East (mainly in a Buddhist monastery in South Korea), although for most of this year he seems to have been in Berlin. Despite this – he also lived in Paris and somewhere in the north of Italy for a long time before Berlin – he is that rare author who has never been accused by readers and critics of anti-patriotism and abandoning his roots.

Similarly, despite only producing a book once every four years or so, Pelevin has a genuine cult following, and enjoys a perpetual popularity to make more prolific writers turn green with envy.

Although he made his debut as a fantasy writer, Pelevin quickly did something completely unprecedented in Russian literature: he left behind the narrow bounds of this caste, and entered the deep waters of “real” literature.

When the group Va-bank made one of Pelevin’s novels into a quasi-rock-opera, the writer gave the project his enthusiastic backing, despite not having many links to today’s music scene.

And Pelevin was the only Russian – indeed the only Eastern European – to make the New Yorker’s 2000 list of Europe’s top six contemporary authors.

Finally, Pelevin is maybe the only modern Russian writer whose patronymic – Olegovich – is as well known to his readers as his first name and surname …

But possibly the most surprising aspect of Pelevin’s novels is that, for all their enigmatic complexity and multiple layers, they are completely transparent to both the ordinary reader and the serious critic. And this is why they are so popular.

In fact, all of Pelevin’s books, from the first to the most recent, are perfect portraits of their time. Afisha magazine columnist Lev Danilkin summed up Pelevin’s place in 1990s literature this way: “It was Pelevin who explained what was happening in actual fact at the end of the 1980s, and at the beginning and the end of the 1990s, in Omon Ra, Chapaev, and Generation P.”

Pelevin details everyday life microscopically, and in doing so reaches depths that most eyes cannot, exposing the mysteriously occult roots of the apparently trivial. He saturates banal occurrences with magic and mysticism, paradoxically reworking Soviet and post-Soviet historical and cultural mythology. And better than any other living Russian author, he captures the zeitgeist with a documentarian’s accuracy, showing both its comic and sinister sides.

Gods and Spiders

Little more is known about Pelevin’s childhood and formative years than is known about his life today. If reference books and the scraps he throws out in interviews are to be believed, Victor Pelevin was born into a military family in Moscow in 1962 and grew up in a classic communal apartment on Tverskaya bulvar. It was here that he first rode a bike, a passion that he has retained all his life – Pelevin says the humble bike is still his favorite mode of transport, and that he has neither a car nor a driver’s license. Like most intelligentsia children of his generation, Pelevin attended a school that specialized in English before attending the Moscow Energy Institute and subsequently doing post-graduate work there. (In Soviet times this was the best way to avoid being drafted into the Army and being packed off to the middle of nowhere.) But he never finished his thesis, as by the middle of the 1980s his interests had shifted to literature – he even matriculated at the Distance-Learning Department of the Literature Institute, but he never graduated; literary success overtook him first.

Pelevin’s first works appeared in science fiction magazines at the end of the 1980s. Just a couple of years later, editors of influential, “serious” literary journals started to pay attention. In 1992-1993 he got his big break. His first collection of stories, Dark Blue Light (published in the US as The Blue Lantern), was a bestseller (no mean achievement in an era dominated by cheap, imported books), but it was after the publication of his novels Omon Ra and The Life of Insects that Pelevin began to be talked about as the mouthpiece of a generation and a living legend.

The phantasmagorical Insects made simultaneous reference to the work of Franz Kafka and the Russian tradition of Karamzin. Pelevin takes innocuous conflicts between superficially uninteresting characters, and turns them upside down and inside out to reveal their monstrous, underlying cause. In the book, a cornucopia of characters – from gallant soldiers to simple workers – suddenly metamorphose into six- and eight-legged creatures, endowed with a hard shell and compound eyes to complement their insectoid instincts and interests. The characters’ lives and actions acquire a double meaning. And with each page it becomes more and more difficult to work out where the insect ends and the human begins. For example, this is how Pelevin reports the dialog between two moth-men who meet by chance on a dance floor in a small seaside town in the south of Russia:

“Well, for instance, last winter I did notice one thing. That most of the time in Moscow it’s dark. Not in the figurative sense, but in the actual meaning of the word. I remember I was standing in the kitchen talking on the telephone. There was a weak yellow bulb near the ceiling. I looked out the window and it struck me how dark it was...”

“Yes,” said Dima. “Something like that happened to me, too. And then I realized something else – that we live in this darkness all the time, only sometimes it’s just a little bit brighter. Strictly speaking, you become a moth the moment you realize that you are surrounded by darkness.”

“I don’t know,” said Mitya. “I think the way moths and butterflies are divided into night creatures and day creatures is purely arbitrary. In the final analysis, they all fly toward the light. It’s instinct.”

“No. We’re divided into night creatures and day creatures because some of us fly toward the light and some fly toward the darkness. How can you fly toward the light, tell me, if you think you’re already surrounded by the light?”†

In Omon Ra, Pelevin plays around with stock Soviet propaganda phrases, and especially with the myth of the success of the country’s space program. The novel’s central character is given the unfortunate name of Omon (the acronym for Russia’s much-feared riot police, but also similar to one of the top-ranking gods of Ancient Egypt, Amon-Ra) by his alcoholic father. Young Omon enters an air-force college named after Alexei Maresyev, a World War II hero who lost his legs in combat but was still able to dance to Kalinka on his prosthetic limbs and returned to duty. Omon is shocked to discover in his first few days that the college provides no flying training at all – and moreover that there has been no aviation in the USSR for years. But worse is to come: During the very first week of study, all students are to have their legs amputated – like their “patron saint” Maresyev – after which they have to spend five years learning to walk, and then dance to the notorious Kalinka at their graduation exam. Omon keeps his legs thanks to a series of coincidences, and joins the holy of holies: the cosmonaut squadron. But here horror and disenchantment await: the whole Soviet space program is a farce, built on dozens and hundreds of lives of condemned kamikazes sent into space without the slightest hope of return. But it gets worse. The full truth, Omon finds out, is that no Russian has ever been into space (weightlessness simulators were actually created on Earth), and the Soviet Union never had anything like a space program: The whole thing is the product of a conspiracy of aged occultists who worship Egyptian gods and Marxism-Leninism, while setting themselves bizarre missions…

Both Insects and Omon Ra are rightly seen as some of the best of early-1990s Russian literature. Pelevin managed to capture the shifting, shaky zeitgeist as if it were an exhibit in the Kunstkamera; the zeitgeist of a time when there was no USSR, but no Russia either, when generations born and raised in the Soviet Union were forced into a stifling, lethal social vacuum. For this reason, his fame was assured not just as a wordsmith, but as a dispassionate, perspicacious chronicler.

But it soon became clear that Pelevin’s powers of description and interpretation were not yet exhausted. In the middle of the 1990s, only Pelevin could claim to be a prophet able not only to expound to Russians the deeper meaning of what was going on around them, but also to predict †their future.

Heroes and Phantoms

The era of Yeltsin-style democracy, Wild West lawlessness, perpetual Latin American soap operas, exorbitant wealth and equally excessive poverty was a time of genuine triumph for Victor Pelevin.

Pelevin’s longest – and, according to his devoted fans – best novel, Chapaev and the Void (published in the US as Buddha’s Little Finger), came out in 1996, and immediately generated a storm of controversy. While some critics – best exemplified by Mikhail Sverdlov in the journal Novy Mir – damned Chapaev as “utter tautology, an ‘engulfing void,’” many more joined with the essayist Alexander Genis in saying that, “This is the first serious Zen Buddhist novel in Russian literature!”

In the novel, Pelevin takes the mustachioed modern-day musketeer Vasily Chapaev – a legendary Civil War hero and the subject of countless jokes and stories – and turns him into a mystic and enlightened Buddhist. Chapaev’s adventures, meanwhile, related in myriad Soviet books and films, acquire unexpected traits of a transcendental spiritual Odyssey. At the same time, the novel’s contemporary line recounts allegorically all the evil’s of Yeltsin’s Russia; one part details the wanderings on this sinful Earth of ‘Simple Mary,’ a heroine from a sentimental Mexican soap opera, who functions as the genius of good and beauty. Chapaev and the Void is stylistically impeccable, and rich in both profound, subtle ideas and nuanced observations of history and the present. From a purely literary point of view, it remains Pelevin’s unsurpassed peak.

Commercially, though, Pelevin’s most successful novel was not Chapaev, but 1999’s Generation P (published in the UK as Babylon). The hugely popular novel is Pelevin’s funniest, most acerbic, and most terrifying work, and secured his status as Russia’s Writer Number 1. And it sold in incredible quantities by the standards of the time – more than 400,000 copies to date (roughly the same as Russian sales of the first two Harry Potter books, for example).

Pelevin creates a text of unprecedented bravery and originality by fusing together the everyday with the mystical, by melding archaic creeds with cutting-edge technology. With a narrative telling the reader that life is in fact a dream and nothing more, in Generation P Pelevin stretches this theory to its limits, with state institutions, national symbols, long-hallowed precepts and even politicians themselves turning out to be a dream. While climbing a wonderfully caricatured career ladder, the hero of Generation P – public relations professional Vavilen Tatarsky – gradually uncovers the sinister truth: there are no politicians and no politics in Russia, and never have been. Politicians from Yeltsin to Zhirinovsky to Zyuganov are just television phantoms produced by 3D computer modeling. The job of PR people, meanwhile, is to manipulate them, creating an endless political soap opera for easily duped voter-viewers. And all this for one simple reason: to increase revenues from television advertising and clever product placement.

But the top level of this ominous comic ziggurat is not the PR people or even the advertisers, but a mysterious society of followers of the ancient Mesopotamian cult of the goddess Ishtar. It would be a serious error, however, to think that these global conspirators have complicated or exalted aims: in Pelevin’s world, the sublime is merely a figure of speech.

The absurdity of the world which Pelevin creates in Generation P is best summed up in the television news written by one of the heroes and read on TV by the novel’s main villain, who goes by the name of Azadovsky:

Very, very soon the nuclear cruiser “Idiot” – whose keel was laid for the 150th anniversary of Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky birth – will leave the docks of Murmansk. At present, it is unclear whether the government will ever be paid back on its loan to build the boat, and therefore voices are being raised ever louder to build another cruiser of the Bogonosets† Potemkin class, a ship so big that sailors call it a floating village. At present, the Bogonosets Potemkin is sailing the Arctic Ocean toward its port of registry. Book News!” Azadkovsky pulled a book out of thin air, its cover shimmering with the sacral combination of an exploding grenade, a chainsaw and a naked woman. “It takes fists to bring about The Good. We have known this for a long time, yet something has still been lacking! And now here it is – the book you have been waiting for several years now...! The Adventures of Svyatoslav the Cruel. Economic News! Today the State Duma declared the new contents for the annual basket of consumer goods. It will now include 20 kilos of pasta products, 100 kilos of potatoes, six kilos of pork, a coat, a pair of shoes, a fur cap with earflaps and a Sony Black Triniton TV. From Persia we hear that...

It may sound unbelievable now, but when Yeltsin was president such a treatment of contemporary politics – unmotivated plot-line shifts, the eccentricities of a drunken president, surprise firings and even more unexpected hirings – was not at all fantastical. In fact, by recognizing these absurdities, Pelevin produced a healthy dose of cynicism and rationality to unburden the reader’s soul and finally abandon the search for meaning where no meaning could be found.

The ingenious Generation P was soon broken up into quotations and sayings, and many assumed that it would be Pelevin’s last great book, as the 1990’s – the era which made him and which he so beautifully explained – came to an end. Could the era’s greatest bard survive, or would he fade with the decade – remaining in folk memory as much a part of the 1990’s as New Russians and the resurrection of the Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow? The answer was a long time coming, because Pelevin took four years to produce his new book, dedicated not to Yeltsin’s Russia, but to Putin’s.

Victor Can’t Fail

Without fear of exaggeration, the 1990’s can be called the Decade of Pelevin. In that time, a generation grew up which viewed Pelevin not just as a writer, but also as a guru or oracle, and also as the only reliable mediator between the real and transcendental worlds. So it’s not difficult to imagine the impatience with which they waited for their idol’s new book.

However, not even Pelevin’s most avid fans were agreed on whether he could continue his winning streak. The optimists were convinced that Pelevin’s new book would finally provide answers to all of today’s key questions, from the epochal “Who is Mr. Putin?” to the more naïve “The Internet: Better than Dope?” The skeptics on the other hand maintained, like Heraclitus, that you can’t step into the same river twice. Therefore, they said, it would be better if Pelevin declared frankly that Generation P had been his swan song, and retired at the height of his powers. Otherwise, he could risk tarnishing his fame and disappointing his admirers by trying to explain a new set of realities – ones which he himself did not understand.

Passions reached a fever pitch on the eve of the publication of DPP (NN) [the title is an acronym for “Dialectic of the Transition Period (From Out-of-Nowhere and Going-Nowhere)”] – to be published in the US under the title The Numbers. So when rumors began to fly that Pelevin’s new novel was not really a new novel, and that the writer had abandoned his usual style for something completely different, Pelevin addicts began to panic.

As it turned out, the panic was unjustified. DPP was released for last year’s Moscow International Book Fair, and on close inspection was revealed to be not a novel, but a collection of short stories continuing the plot and style lines Pelevin traced in Generation P. It is also a more literal continuation, in that the action takes up at virtually the same point at which Generation P ends. In addition to heroes from the previous novel, Pelevin’s style (knitting together profound concepts with occasionally crude but always memorable witticisms) and philosophy (the world is an illusion, and a cruel and un-inventively constructed one at that) both moved on in DPP.

Much also changed to meet the requirements of the time. The businessmen-cum-heroes who previously were protected by the Chechen mafia moved to being under the wing of the FSB mafia, and spent much more time on the Internet (mainly porn sites) than in front of their TVs. Politics, previously a substantial issue for Pelevin, moved to the periphery – for Pelevin, as for most Russians, questions like “Who is Mr. Putin?” and “Where is Russia going?” are increasingly unimportant. As usual, Pelevin has his finger firmly on the pulse of the zeitgeist, making entertainment and sex his cornerstone rather than power and riches, the idols of the previous decade. As for the mysticism that permeated the pages of his previous work, Pelevin replaces Egyptian and Mesopotamian gods and Zen Buddhism with numerology; more precisely, a fatal obsession with the number 34 and an equally fatal hatred of 43 consumes the main character of “Numbers,” the most significant story in DPP.

Convinced that time had not changed Pelevin too much, the author’s fans – and many other people besides – flocked to bookstores in droves, guaranteeing DPP a place at the top of the bestseller list for months. Literary experts, however, were much cooler.

“This is the 2000s as the 1990s might have seen them,” was how one of Russia’s most authoritative critics, Alexander Gavrilov, editor-in-chief of the newspaper Knizhnoye Obozreniye, described DPP. But that was relatively mild: Vremya Novostey columnist Andrei Nemzer called it “scoffing, staggering, and irresponsible gossip.” Moskovskiye Novosti critic Mikhail Zolotonosov was more prolix but no more gentle: “Pelevin consciously works in the genre of ‘literarized nonsense,’ which absorbs games with numbers and vulgarized images from Eastern philosophies, and which obviously appears to publishers to be more sellable.” There were some positive reviews, for example from renowned author, poet, critic, and television presenter Dmitry Bykov, who could not hide his delight, declaring that, “the new Pelevin is even more amusing, even more contemptuous, even more foolhardy. As before, he gives the reader the greatest happiness, touching nerves in such a way that it is not painful, but funny.” But in comparison with the reserved and negative opinions these did not carry much weight.

Although not unsuccessful, strictly speaking, DPP is a mixed bag. Previously, Pelevin seemed to be boldly striding forward, coolly and clearly looking into the future and showing others the way. Now he seemed to be at best face-to-face with his readers, and occasionally lost in contemplation or even lagging behind them.

In fact, Pelevin seemed to have unlearned how to see the deeper meaning and driving forces behind things, without wasting his unique ability to spot genuinely important patterns in the surrounding reality and thereby reliably reflect it. Pelevin’s earlier texts could be likened to genre-based philosophical canvases, but DPP is the spitting image of a caricature – subtle and humorous, but unfortunately primitive and superficial.

But this does not mean that DPP is weak and unworthy of attention. The National Bestseller award it won – Russia’s second most important literary award after the Russian Booker – and a stay of almost a year in the literary charts in Moscow and St. Petersburg seem completely justified. Books of such scope come out rarely in Russia; one of them is enough to be able to say, with no concessions to the author’s reputation, that DPP (NN) is one of, if not the most significant Russian book of 2003.

But, nonetheless, the truth will out. Pelevin has made a superhuman effort to stay at the top of the tree after reaching probably the high point of his published career five years ago. To do this, he has had to mercilessly exploit the devices he developed in Generation P, thereby artificially stretching the aura of popularity surrounding it and extending it to his next brainchild. The aura is slightly faded, and in places has come apart at the seams, so to speak, but has held together.

For now, Russia’s love-affair with Pelevin is still going strong. But readers’ patience is almost at an end. One book – not weak per se, but derivative – can be forgiven; a second misfire will not be. The moment of truth, which many thought would be Pelevin’s first post-1990’s novel, has clearly been postponed. The author’s final destiny – to become a great contemporary writer with Solzhenitsyn, or remain a slightly dubious idol for the pushy youth of the 1990s – will be decided by his next novel. Or possibly the absence of it, which would be even more eloquent.   RL

† – Life of Insects, FSG, translator, Andrew Bromfield.

† – play on the word Bronenosets, “iron-clad cruiser,” this could perhaps be translated as Godclad Cruiser.