Victor Pelevin and Eurasianist Geopolitics

Abstract

AbstractThe first decades of Victor Pelevin’s writing coincided with the burst in popularity of neo‐Eurasianist and neo‐imperialist ideas. This paper traces the various forms that Pelevin’s treatment of civilizational and geopolitically focused ideologies has taken over the course of his career. His preoccupation with these ideas ranges from inconspicuous reflection of the Eurasian phenomenon to Eurasianism’s intensifying critique, and, eventually, to a more comprehensive engagement with concepts of classical geopolitics. If early on Pelevin’s portrayal of neo‐imperialists and their ideas has been largely satirical (Empire V, 2006), in the 2010s his texts began to demonstrate a deeper entanglement in civilizational thought and expression of a geopolitical worldview. “Operation ‘Burning Bush’” (2010), S.N.U.F.F. (2012), and Batman Apollo (2013), while maintaining a satirical take on aspects of the neo‐imperialist worldview, reveal the author’s internalized perception of the world as a stage for the clash of civilizations, and Pelevin’s seemingly growing conservatism. Ultimately, as postmodernist tendencies become common in the political sphere, Pelevin again blends the esoteric and the political by bringing Eurasianist noospherism into “The Art of Light Touches” (2019), lending a metaphysical angle to the antagonism between Russia and the West, and demonstrating how fiction can penetrate public discourse and vice versa.