Power and the Aerial Sublime in Victor Pelevin

Abstract

AbstractThis essay distinguishes flight as a salient trope throughout multiple Pelevin texts: Omon Ra (1992), Chapaev and the Void (1996), Generation P (1999), Empire V (2006), and Love for Three Zuckerbrins (2014). It examines flight through the aesthetics of the sublime—classical, (post)‐Soviet, and postmodern. The “aerial sublime” focuses on the motifs of flight, elevation, and their reversal such as descent and going underground. Through this analysis, the essay offers an entry point to the question of Pelevin’s preoccupation with the subject’s relation to power—political, military, and capital‐, media‐, or technology‐driven. The airborne protagonist is positioned in spatial counterpoint to tyrannical social and cosmic forces. One may remain in their clutches or escape, withdraw, comically yield, or pragmatically acquiesce. Pelevin’s aerial sublime grows increasingly bleak: from an internalized ethical experience to active thought work without resolution, touching the noumenal, or ethical to the apotheosis of the non‐reasoning, non‐ethical, and inhuman. That is, his later works envision the sublime transformed into an anti‐sublime through power annihilating the human as a sentient and ethical agent. Pelevin’s aerial sublime thereby conveys lessons about ironclad social and cosmic mechanics and the subject that is constituted, coerced, and occasionally resistant to it.