Viktor Pelevin, a Postmodernist Prophet: How a Post-Soviet Writer Seeks Truth

Abstract

This paper discusses Viktor Pelevin’s creative work and reveals the main conceptual and thematic areas and structural procedures that have contributed to the fact that Pelevin’s works are among the most widely read works in Russia today, and that Pelevin is one of the best-known Russian prose writers in the world. Russian literary historians’ classifications, which place Pelevin among postmodernist writers, serve as guidelines for this paper. Although it does not deny the postmodernist procedures used in the narrative structure, it relativizes these findings and demonstrates that, behind the postmodernist mask, there are designs and relationships that bring Pelevin close to classical Russian literature: art has the specific task of teaching people something. – Pelevin’s creative path began at a time when it became clear that the idea of the Soviet communist paradise was a utopia. The understanding that the Soviet model of the world was an illusion also characterized Pelevin’s early works: a young man that has only just started living recognizes the mechanisms that the Soviet authorities used to manipulate people’s concepts of truth (Omon Ra). In this way, a narrative scheme builds up, similar to the Soviet “production” novel, which was based on a teacher-student relationship: the teacher teaches about reality and how one must get to know it. In the Soviet novel, the teacher is the bearer of communist ideas through which the authorities realize the concept of the Soviet paradise; however, in Pelevin the teacher changes with development and becomes the defender of the Buddhist concept of the void (Chapayev i pustota, published in English as Buddha’s Little Finger and Clay Machine Gun). With this concept, which becomes a recognizable constant of Pelevin’s mature works, people should be rescued from the learned mental images that prevent them from breathing freely. – The structural teacher-student relationship also remains a constant in Pelevin’s works, although it is transformed over time. In developing his awareness, the student begins to turn into a teacher, thus becoming the creator of a different concept of the world that is now being built by advertising as the main form of manipulation in the new world (Generation П). An important conceptual change takes place: it seems people cannot internalize the Buddhist concept of the void by which they could free themselves of prior constructs because they seem to be fatally dependent on the set models that, each in its own way, defend the concept of truth. In Pelevin’s works, the concepts of people and animals gain increasingly greater importance; this is supposed to be just the right manifestation that enables the student to pass into the void (The Sacred Book of the Werewolf). The idea emerges that vampires are the true rulers of the world, but they too resemble humans too much to be able to pass into “nowhere.” A foreboding emerges that a great explosion of light will destroy the world (Empire V). – The phases in the teacher-student relationship presented in the process of this analysis argue in favor of the thought described in the introduction – that is, that in Pelevin’s works, one is in fact dealing with the manifestations of a single character that experiences transformations in space and time. Consequently, I propose that Pelevin’s works be addressed as one work with several variations, whose narrations always elucidate the same questions from various perspectives: what is true reality supposed to be in the first place?