on specifically “Russian subject matter”; in fact, he says, subject matter as such does not exist.32 He doesn’t care for Sorokin and considers postmodernism overall to be “like eating the flesh of a dead culture.” Influenced by the philosopher Nicolas Berdyaev and the Symbolist poet Aleksandr Blok, Pelevin has pursued a single question, to which the politics of post-communism contributes only tangentially: what is reality, and where must one stand to gain access to it? He gives the reader very few clues, and none at all from his personal biography.33 Contrary to the heroic Dostoevsky–Tolstoy–Solzhenitsyn model, where one’s life openly nourishes one’s art, Pelevin cultivates the image of a mystic recluse: rarely appearing in public, disappearing for long stretches of time (often to Tibet), and almost never granting interviews (only contradictory press statements). One suspects that this is the sort of biographical image Gogol would have cultivated, had he the means, managerial skill, and technology.
Pelevin’s first route to “reality” was science fiction. But he goes further than Gogol in “The Nose” or Bulgakov in Heart of a Dog. Both those masters of the grotesque remain within the realm of the human, or at least of the animate. One early Pelevin story, “The Life and Adventures of Shed Number XII” (1991), concerns the coming to consciousness of a storage shed, a delicate process dependent upon its contents (bicycles or barrels of brine). When the bikes are moved out and the pickle-barrels take over, the shed commits suicide. Like Akaky Akakievich, the shed returns to haunt its owner, in the form of a spectral bicycle. Pelevin’s oscillation between equally valid, utterly different worlds is more clinical than uncanny. His 1994 novel The Life of Insects, populated by mosquitoes, dung beetles, flying ants, and moths, has been compared with Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” but the analogy is inexact. Kafka’s Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning as a beetle and remains one until his miserable death.
242 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature
Pelevin manages to show us a bloodsucking mosquito who is at the same time a New Russian businessman, back and forth in the same scene and even from the same balcony – and a sexy housefly Natasha who flirts, sunbathes, and sips a drink full-size, only seconds before ending up as a speck on restaurant flypaper.
Pelevin’s work has been described as a “satirico-philosophical fantasy” as well as a “mix of super-science fiction and harsh realism.”34 In Chapter 1 we briefly mentioned the hero of Pelevin’s first novel Omon Ra (1992), Omon Krivomazov [“Crooked-smear”], who thinks he is training as a cosmonaut. He has enrolled in the Meresyev Flying School, named after Aleksei Meresyev, the legendary World War II pilot who continued to fly sorties after having lost both his legs in combat (a deed immortalized in Boris Polevoy’s socialist realist classic Story of a Real Man [1946] and in Prokofiev’s opera of the same name [1948]). Omon’s flight instructor welcomes the entering class by recalling Meresyev’s heroism: “after losing his legs, he didn’t lose heart, he rose up again on artificial legs and soared into the sky like Icarus to strike at the Nazi scum! . . . and we will make Real Men of you too in the shortest possible time.”35 Indeed: the school’s initiation ritual for each new trainee involves amputating the feet (or legs: the Russian word noga refers to both foot and leg, so it is unclear how far up the surgery extends). The reference to Icarus is apt. Like Platonov’s Foundation Pit, the higher the deception soars, the more subterranean and awful the reality. The Soviet space program is being run by cripples and trick cameras from the Moscow Metro – the pride of Stalinist construction, built partly by slave labor, here revealed as a shabby, deceptive, muddy maze of tunnels.
Life and death in their physiological dimension are not easily distinguishable in Pelevin’s later work. A devoted Buddhist, Pelevin gives us one lucid Eastern parable, The Yellow Arrow (1993), in which a sealed train carrying a cross section of late communist society is heading toward a ruined bridge. The hero, who manages to crawl up to the roof of a train car and look around (passengers are allowed to do this, but most aren’t interested), suddenly “wakes up.” This interrupts the Chain of Being. The train stops, time stops, bubbles are suspended in a glass of liquid; he gets off and walks into a dusty unmarked wilderness.
The most complex intersection that Pelevin makes with the Russian literary tradition is his 1996 novel Chapayev and Emptiness (1996, first appearing in English as The Clay Machine Gun, then retitled Buddha’s Little Finger). It links Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, a bit of Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, the 1919–21 Civil War, Stalinist-era heroism and kitsch, Eastern mysticism (real and bogus), and the venerable tradition of alternative truths accessible only in the madhouse. The hero, Peter Emptiness [Pyotr Pustota] is, as far as we can tell, a suspect writer trying to avoid arrest. He lives simultaneously in two times,
From the first Thaw to the end 243
Moscow of the 1990s and the post-revolutionary Civil War circa 1919. Pyotr’s first assignment as a recruit of the Bolshevik secret police is to raid (read: shoot the audience in) a Symbolist cafe?, where some poets are putting on a little play called “Raskolnikov and Marmeladov” in the style of Chekhov’s Seagull. One of those famous poets, Valery Bryusov, asks Pyotr if he’s found time yet to read Blok’s The Twelve. Pyotr says yes – but “What is Christ doing walking in front of the patrol? Does Blok perhaps wish to crucify the revolution?”36 Pyotr wakes up from that politically fraught nightmare in an asylum for the insane. As with the Master’s weirdly engineered fate in Bulgakov’s novel, however, this asylum is no torture chamber; it is a modern clinic equipped with the most humane drugs and cutting-edge cures, including dream therapy.
As the novel progresses, an Eastern element begins to displace the Dosto-evskian.During further dreams in theasylum, Pyotr becomes a discipleofVasily Chapayev (1887–1919), peasant commander for the Red Army on the Far Eastern front. Structurally, the Chapayev legend functions for Pelevin somewhat as the Jerusalem chapters and Yeshua/Jesus do for Bulgakov in that equally layered novel. The historical Chapayev, cut down in battle, was revered as a secular martyr of the Revolution and became part of its holy writ, a Stalinist icon adapted for stage, screen, and opera. But Pelevin returns Chapayev to his true guise as Buddhist seer. By the end of the novel, on the edge of discovering “inner Mongolia,” all matter is about to pass away.
Chapayev and Emptiness is a seriocomic pastiche of Russian fantasies about space: upper, lower, outer, across, the unmappable Eurasian frontier and physical volume that does not have to obey the laws of Western materialism. It is, in its way, a postmodernist sunken city of Kitezh. Inevitably, Pelevin’s project has been associated with Marshall McLuhan’s media extravaganzas and with the French theorist of simulacra and simulations, Jean Baudrillard. But as one astute student of the current literary scene has observed, “Pelevin is interested not in the transformation of reality into simulacra but rather in the reverse process: the birth of reality out of simulacra. This strategy is the polar opposite of the major postulates of postmodernist philosophy.”37
Pelevin’s quasi-parodic mysticism and skill at bringing low philosophically highbrow plots have made him a bestseller, with a growing reputation outside Russia. However, both Pelevin’s Buddhism for the masses and Sorokin’s alleged pornography were eclipsed in the first years of the twenty-first century by the runaway impact of the most prolific practitioner of Russia’s fastest-growing genre, the detektiv or detective novel: the Moscow-based, Georgian-Jewish B.[oris] Akunin, pen name of Grigory Chkhartishvili (b. 1958). (The “Bakunin” connection in this pen name is clear; less evident, perhaps, is that
244 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature
Akunin means “villain” in Japanese). Akunin is creator of a cycle of historical mystery novels around the detective Erast Fandorin, all set in the “terrorist” portion of the nineteenth century (1870s-1905). This Fandorin is as clean-living, energetic, disciplined, and self-reliant as the Sorokin hero is befouled and the Pelevin hero is multi- temporal. Fandorin is also a commentary and corrective update to our roster of Russian nineteenth-century heroes, beginning with the poor government clerk.
We first meet Fandorin in the opening novel of the series, AzazeV (1998, translated as The Winter Queen). An eighteen-year-old civil servant of the fourteenth class
