Victor Pelevin and the Aesthetics of Neoreaction

Abstract

AbstractThis article investigates the connections between Victor Pelevin’s recent work and neoreactionary (NRx) discourse, especially the writings of accelerationist philosopher Nick Land and right‐wing “neocameralist” blogger Mencius Moldbug (aka Curtis Yarvin). Though the linguistic and cultural spaces they occupy are seemingly disjoint, the Russian postmodernist and Anglo‐American NRx in fact share intellectual and aesthetic positions. Pelevin's engagement with NRx thought is at once extremely serious—in the sense of being well researched and relatively faithful to the movement's terminology and conceptual apparatus—and apparently parodic. A longtime expert in trolling the reader even before the practice was “radicalized online,” as it were, Pelevin has updated his technique to lambaste common far‐right bugaboos like “political correctness” and “feminism.” As was the case with late‐Soviet stiob, whose mantle he inherits and adapts to the digital era, Pelevin’s mockery manages to eviscerate his targets while allowing room for reasonable doubt as to their precise identity. His possibly mocking, possibly genuine appropriation of far‐right ideology is the latest manifestation of a years‐long critique of discursive and political power that began with the skewering of Soviet authority and spoofs of post‐Soviet neoliberal virtuality, and now continues with attacks on the “blue‐pilled” doyens of Western‐style cultural norms.