Victor Pelevin Research Articles

Literature in the Bardo: George Saunders and Victor Pelevin about the Afterlife

Literature in the Bardo: George Saunders and Victor Pelevin about the Afterlife

Transhumanism as a Phenomenon of Modern Culture (On the Example of Victor Pelevin’s Work)

Transhumanism as a Phenomenon of Modern Culture (On the Example of Victor Pelevin’s Work)

Zabawa czy afekt? O ideologicznym uwikłaniu twórczości Wiktora Pielewina

The aim of the article is to review Victor Pelevin’s works in terms of their critique of current social and political processes as well as various kinds of ideologies and theories. Despite the writer’s association with the group of postmodern artists he is not only focused on typically postmodern text games and playing with readers, his ambitions are also targeted at shaping their views and behaviors. The author of Generation “P” reacts vividly to the changing reality, he is a keen observer with ambitions to influence the world. He raises issues of universal nature, protesting against all ideological norms, social categories, standardizing fashions and stereotypes that enslave human beings, against all ways of manipulating human consciousness. His approach is constantly met with criticism of both pro-Western and traditionalist circles. The former accuse him of an overly skeptical attitude to the Western model of life, while the latter do not like the writer’s ironic approach to social reality, polemics with Russian values and attempts to discredit them.

Zhenskij obraz v zhivopisi Kitaya vtoroj poloviny XX v.: osnovnye faktory i osobennosti transformacii

The article examines the artistic embodiment of Victor Pelevin's view on the historical transition of Russia from the era of wild capitalism to the era of vertical power. The author concludes that in Pelevin's image of Russia of the noughties, despite the existing legal institutions, their capacities are unable to satisfy citizens' demands for justice. It is not laws but mystical practices associated with the magic of numbers, including those associated with the ancient Chinese book of divination, the I Ching. Pelevin guesses the tendency for Russia to turn to the East.

Companion to Victor Pelevin ed. by Sofya Khagi

Companion to Victor Pelevin ed. by Sofya Khagi

출판번역 교정교열의 순기능과 역기능 고찰 — 『아이퍽10』의 번역투를 중심으로 —

This study aims to examine the Korean translationese in the translation of Victor Pelevin's novel 『iPhuck10』, to analyze which correction standards are used in the revision process to correct these translationese, focusing on the positive and negative functions of the revision in the translation for publishing. For this purpose, first, the translator's translation and the publisher's revision were compared and analyzed. And then, typical translationese from Russian texts was extracted, to categorize into vocabulary, syntax, and pragmatic levels. Second, in order to understand the publisher's correction strategy for dealing with the translationese, this study analyzed the specialized books on revision published by professional revisors, examined the correction standards were presented in them. Third, this study reviewed the changes in the translation caused by the publisher's revision and argued that it is undesirable to apply uniform principles throughout the translated text, if the translator intentionally uses the translationese as a translation strategy. Finally, this study argues that to solve these problems, translators must work diligently to avoid using translationese and constantly discuss with revisers to ensure the best results.

Pelevin and Unfreedom: Poetics, Politics, Metaphysics by Sofya Khagi

Reviewed by: Pelevin and Unfreedom: Poetics, Politics, Metaphysics by Sofya Khagi Sarah Gear Pelevin and Unfreedom: Poetics, Politics, Metaphysics. By Sofya Khagi. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. 2021. xi+284 pp. $39.95; £36.50. ISBN 978-0-81014-302-9. In her detailed consideration of Victor Pelevin's literary output, from his short story 'Hermit and Six Toes' (1990) to his novel iPhuck 10 (2017), Sofya Khagi examines the techniques and theoretical preoccupations of a writer who 'likes to think' (p. 216). Khagi argues convincingly that Pelevin deserves scholarly attention. Whether one reads him in post-Soviet Russia, or in the contemporary West, Pelevin's damning observations about capitalism, consumerism, technology, and our resulting unfreedom are relevant to us all. Khagi's excellent Introduction shows how Pelevin's philosophical concerns and opinions about contemporary society are grounded in the theories of Jean Baudrillard, Jean-François Lyotard, Herbert Marcuse, and Michel Foucault, which she discusses throughout this study. Her first two chapters analyse Pelevin's indictment, in his seminal Generation P (1999), of the consumerism unleashed in 1990s Russia. Chapter 1 situates the same novel alongside other dystopian fiction, drawing comparisons with Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, George Orwell's 1984, and Evgenii Zamiatin's We, while Chapter 2 scrutinizes what Khagi terms Pelevin's 'language politics' (p. 49): deliberate disruption of Russian literary language in order to intensify his critique of modern society. Using the central protagonist Tatarskii's advertising slogans as key examples of such subversive linguistic techniques, Khagi makes the case that this experimental use of language embodies Pelevin's beliefs about the degradation of contemporary society. The remaining six chapters build on concerns raised in Generation P to cover related themes in a wide-ranging selection of Pelevin's later works. Empire V (2006), according to Khagi, is concerned with biopolitics and with humanity as a biomass commodity exploited by vampires; Helmet of Horror (2005) and Pineapple Water for the Beautiful Lady (2010) deal with Pelevin's concerns about dehumanization, while illustrating his eschatological views with biblical and apocalyptic imagery. In the last two novels, the most likely outcome is an 'apocalypse of entropy' (p. 121). Chapter 6 follows Pelevin's exploration and exhaustion of the trope of alternative history; tracing intertextual references to predecessors, such as Boris and Arkadii Strugatskii and Dostoevskii, occupies Chapter 7. Finally, Khagi considers Pelevin's multifaceted use of irony throughout his texts, applied as much to his authorial persona as to the world he depicts. It is through irony, she contends, that Pelevin successfully introduces a sliver of hope into his predominantly hope-less texts. More broadly, Khagi traces the arc of Pelevin's thematic development: from preoccupation with Soviet ideology to the new focus on 'global techno-consumerism' (p. 4) which replaces the former after the 1990s. She also notes that Pelevin's solipsism, as expressed in his earlier work, has more recently evolved into a wider ethical regard for others. She counters those critics who accuse him of producing repetitious novels by pointing out that Pelevin's work addresses contemporary society and politics. Therefore any thematic stagnation reflects the stagnation of reality, rather than, as some critics suggest, Pelevin's contempt for his readers. [End Page 314] Perhaps Khagi's most notable claim is for Pelevin as a modern-day Dostoevskii. By considering both writers' concerns about contemporary society, their anti-Western sentiment, their hedgehog-like preoccupation with one central idea, and their characters' quests for self-improvement, Khagi demonstrates strong and convincing parallels between Pelevin and Dostoevskii. This thorough and thought-provoking exposition of Pelevin's œuvre provides a rich resource for academic readings of his work. In keeping with Pelevin's Zeitgeist-y texts, Khagi poses vital and timely questions about the true nature of freedom in an increasingly unfree world. Sarah Gear University of Exeter Copyright © 2022 Modern Humanities Research Association

Преступление и раскаяние Раскольникова в русской и венгерской литературах второй половины XX в.

The article deals with the creative reception of a complex of motifs “sin - repentance - salvation” and the hero’s moral reflections that form the basis of Crime and Punishment and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s unfulfilled plan of a book about the “Great Sinner.” We analyze the works of several Russian and Hungarian authors of the 1960s-1990s. In Victor Pelevin’s novel Chapayev and Pustota, the hero involuntarily becomes a murderer. Instead of being exiled to Siberia, he ends up in a mental hospital, which functionally serves as a replacement for Raskolnikov’s “punishment” stage - a prison sentence. After leaving the hospital, the hero, who has not accepted the new reality, flees to a Buddhist monastery in Inner Mongolia to escape from the criminalized and dangerous modernity. The motifs of crime and failed repentance of the outsider writer are used by Vladimir Makanin in the novel The Underground or the Hero of Our Time. His hero recognizes Dostoevsky’s authority, projecting the novel’s situation onto his own. However, he rejects the need to repent the murders, since for him Raskolnikov’s story is an “alien” literary plot and a humiliation of his very “self.” The heroes of Limonov’s early prose constantly relate themselves to the marginal heroes and criminals of Dostoevsky. For them, the impossibility of repentance does not cancel the hero’s selfdoubt, his “state of hesitation” that determines, according to Dostoevsky, the behavior of the Great Sinner and Raskolnikov. In Russian prose of the 1990s, the text and plot allusions of which refer to Crime and Punishment, the main antihero is a writer and reader of Dostoevsky who tries on the situations and actions of Dostoevsky’s heroes, ultimately dismissing them as “alien” and “literary.” The classics of modern Hungarian literature, Janos Pilinszky and Miklos Meszoly, admitted that they literally lived inside Dostoevsky’s world. The novels of Meszoly of the 1960s, The Death of an Athlete and Saul, both tell the story of rebirth and conversion of two heroes - the runner Balint and the detective Saul. Balint is lonely and aspires to the absolute, a sports record, for which he is willing to sacrifice everything. He is similar to Dostoevsky’s sinner in his pridefulness. However, before his death, he ascends a mountain. The motifs that accompany his “spiritual ascent” point to the sacred symbolism of rebirth. The final change in the direction and purpose of running turns him into an “athleta Christi”, a repentant proud man. However, the plot of Saul does not follow the Bible to the end and finishes with Saul’s blinding, interrupting the biblical story and not representing his enlightenment as of the future Paul the Apostle. Similarly to Crime and Punishment, the novel unfolds around a murder - a “stoning” of the victim, Stephen the Apostle. Saul, like Raskolnikov, renounces his former self-identification and logic of the Law. The shock in both cases is the sin of murder, the internal experience of the crime. Saul takes the blame for the beating of Stephen. The authors declare no conflicts of interests.

Джойсовская традиция романа В. Пелевина «Empire “V”»: от антисциентизма к изобретению нового персонажа

The article examines how Joyce’s detached attitude to progress in the novel Ulysses transforms into the parody-comic anti-scientism of Victor Pelevin’s novel Empire ‘V’. The Russian author not only refuses to recognize positive ontology as of scientific mood but also reduces its mission only to the destruction of reality and return to the basic intuition. The paper proves that Joyce’s methods of splitting the consciousness of the one acquiring scientific knowledge (cognizer) are rethought by Pelevin as the cognizer’s consciousness multiplied to infinity, which produces a subjective multiple reality, turning into a hypertext. Therefore, Pelevin turns Joyce’s hypostatized elements into independent agents, being characters of a new type. These characters are faced with the question of their real / possible existence in a subjective multiple reality. Thus, these new characters are interpreted within the framework of the subject-object antinomy, as fiction proceeds from subject-object relations. The paper aims to determine the influence of the Joycean principle of splitting subjective consciousness in Ulysses on the creation by V. Pelevin of characters and ways of expressing the new type in Empire ‘V’. The subject of study is the features of the invention of the new-type characters as a tool for organizing fictional decisions in Pelevin’s novel Empire ‘V’. The paper is the first study to prove that the artistic method showing the split consciousness in the heroes of the Pelevin’s novel directly develops Joyce’s epistemological tradition of the cognizer’s crisis, but in the era of weird-philosophy. The main research techniques employed: comparative method, historical and cultural contextualization, discourse analysis.

Psychoanalysis and Its Discontents: Vladimir Nabokov and Victor Pelevin’s The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

Psychoanalysis and Its Discontents: Vladimir Nabokov and Victor Pelevin’s The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

The linguistic features and translation specifications of the novel generation “p” by Victor Pelevin

The authors focus on the linguistic features characterising a postmodern novel on the example of the literary work Generation “P” by Victor Pelevin. Firstly, the impossibility of new style invention and the idea of the necessity of different styles combination are highlighted: stylistically marked words such as jargon words, low-colloquial lexis, poetic and archaic words, idioms, and even scientific terms all together create a unique style of the novel. Secondly, the implementation levels of the language game are considered. Two levels of language game representation are analysed: the mix of styles and the loss of figurativeness by phraseological units. The intertextual context of the novel and a common method of postmodernism known as “rewriting” are regarded in the article. A phenomenon of language game and intertextuality are analyzed based on the translation of the novel by Andrew Bromfield.

Selling a Story: A Case Study of Five Book Covers for Victor Pelevin’s Generation “P”

In this article, book-cover design is studied in relation to translation and marketing. The discussion is centered on a case study of the Russian, British, American, Danish, and Norwegian editions of Victor Pelevin’s Generation “P” (Babylon in the U.K. and Homo Zapiens in the U.S.). The analysis of the book covers focuses on marketing strategy and argues that the cover of a translation affects how a novel is read and understood in the target culture.

The Motif of Losing Oneself in The Novel Generation “P ” by Victor Pelevin

In traditional Russian literature, the motif of losing oneself regularly serves as the motivation for spiritual transformation and search for salvation of the character, promoting the plot of a literary text and creating new types of characters. However, it is not difficult to notice the transformation in the utilization and implementation of this motif in the plot composition of postmodern texts based on the principle of uncertainty and randomness, which is opposed to the teleology of the classical narrative. The relevance of the topic is due to the insufficiency of research on such changes, especially in the postmodern works by Viktor Pelevin. Though there have been several observations on Pelevin’s textual structure, the role of motifs in organizing and constructing the plot remains outside the scope of researchers’ attention. This article aims to reveal the role and specifics of the motif “the loss of oneself” as a plot-forming component in the novel Generation “P” by V. O. Pelevin. Based on the contemporary motif theory, it particularly pays attention to the context of allomotifs and events associated with the motifeme of losing oneself, following A. Dundes, who understands the motifeme as the basic unit in the paradigmatics of the narrative, and allomotifs as its syntagmatic variants. Through analyzing various variations of allomotifs “the loss of oneself” (losing the feeling of eternity, symbolic death, metamorphosis, manipulation, etc.), the paper attempts to reveal constructive components of the narrative structure in this novel, which determined its artistic semantics. Arguing the tragic essence of the individual value orientation on consumerism in the context of the eschatological media mythology, it also finds out that Pelevin constructs the plot as Tatarsky’s rising up the career ladder, accompanied by the loss of personality, the replacement of Homo sapiens by Homo Zappiens. To achieve this purpose, he widely uses different schemes that implement the emic motifeme through various variations of allomotifs. That’s why, the success of the protagonist in the ending does not mean the spiritual salvation, but the totality of submission to the God of money and immersion in the void, where the way out of the new social and mental impasse is impossible not only for the protagonist but also for the novelist himself. Keywords: Victor Pelevin, Generation “P”， motifeme of losing oneself, set of allomotifs, mythopoetics

Performatism as the Overcoming of Postmodernism

The article maintains that Russian culture since the late 1990s has turned away from postmodernism and has entered a new, post-postmodern era that the author calls performatism. The main strategy of performatism is to compel belief using formal means (per formam). This belief takes place in an independent esthetic realm apart from any religious rituals or institutions. In theory, performatism operates within narrative by creating closed spaces in which positive identifications take place and give arise to experiences of love, transcendence, beauty, sincerity etc. These positive identifications in turn ward off postmodern irony. The article shows in concrete terms how performatism works by examining in detail five of its major strategies. These include double framing (creating closed spaces in a narrative), the stylization of a radically separated subject and a mediator, the empowerment of that subject, the development of an ethics of transgression, and the use of ostensive signs. These are exemplified by the works of such well-known contemporary Russian writers and filmmakers as Victor Pelevin, Evgeniy Grishkovets, Alexander Ilichevsky, Zakhar Prilepin, Andrey Zvyagintsev, Andrey Konchalovsky and others. The article also delves into the limitations of posthistorical (postmodern) thinking, which treats cultural artifacts exclusively in terms of their place in a spatial context and ignores their relations to one another in time (diachrony).

W poszukiwaniu utraconego (czy nieosiągalnego?) szczęścia... Postmodernistyczno-buddyjski „traktat” Wiktora Pielewina: powieść Тайные виды на гору Фудзи

Victor Pelevin belongs to the most popular and controversial contemporary Russian writers. He always leaves behind more questions than answers. Pelevin is recognized as one of the leading representatives of postmodernism in Russia. His novel Secret Views of Mount Fuji (2018) is the subject of the analysis in this paper. The plot of this novel is based on the story of three Russian oligarchs (unhappy oligarchs), who have experienced all the joys of life and begin to use a startup that offers different kinds of happiness. Pelevin pays special attention to a businessman named Fedya (Fyodor Semyonovich). The author makes a reference to the Buddhist concept of happiness and sets out in some detail the Buddhist theory of jhan – the successive stages of comprehending the highest truth. Pelevin says that everyone has their own happiness. One to achieve this state needs the truth, the other – its absence. The purpose of this article is: at first to show Pelevin’s point of view on the correlation between happiness and wealth, and secondly, to discuss Pelevin’s answers to the following questions: „what exactly is happiness?”, “is it true that money does not make us happy?”, “can we buy happiness with money?”.

Идиома «Дважды два четыре» в русской литературе ХХ века

<p>The idiom “twice two is four” along with its variations is seen in the article as a marker of the situation of an “underground man”. In literature of the twentieth century the “underground” in its ethical and philosophical aspects has expanded its meaning, becoming the context of a utopian and antiutopian thought, absorbing the tragic experience of Russian culture after Dostoevsky. Of course, the widespread locution “as sure as twice two is four” does not always point at this variety of meanings, but it can be reached only in combination with the psychological type of the “underground man”. Thus, the image of Stalin in the novel “the First Circle” by Alexander Solzhenitsyn is considered as a variation of the “underground” consciousness. The problems of philosophical, history related to the evolution of this type of consciousness and actualized in this novel, remain important for modern literature. Another version of this philosophical collision is given in Victor Pelevin’s anti-utopian novel “S.N.U.F.F.”. In both of these cases, the situation of the underground person becomes a picture of a psychological and historical catastrophe. The negative development of the analyzed arithmetic formula in Russian literature of the 20th century encourages to look for another pole of tradition outside the “main” cultural domains. One of the variants of a moral escape from the trap of the “underground consciousness” can be found in the poetry of Alexander Bashlachev. The mythopoetical plot of the song “Verka, Nadka, Lyubka” is an exceptional variant of the development of the “underground man” topic. A starting point of the plot is just the formula “twice two is four”. The genre shift from lyricism to allegorical epic gives the poet an opportunity to reconstruct the Easter ideal of Russian culture, even if in a tragic and provocative form, close to the tradition of Russian foolishness for Christ.</p>

Этика и гуманизм искусственного интеллекта (на материале романа В. Пелевина “IPhuck 10”)

The research objectives are as follows: to identify a prognostic world model in Victor Pelevin’s novel “iPhuck 10” and, taking this model as a basis, to specify ways of artificial intelligence functioning in the future society, to outline ontological prospects for artificial intelligence development. Scientific originality of the study is conditioned by the fact that artificial intelligence as a social problem has not been previously investigated and anti-utopian problematics of Pelevin’s novel “iPhuck 10” has not previously attracted researchers’ attention. The conducted research allows concluding that Pelevin’s novel highlights danger of social autism and emphasizes necessity to differentiate artificial intelligence and human consciousness.

Художественные реалии в ранних рассказах Виктора Пелевина

The purpose of the article is to identify the functions of the “alien word” in the process of creating artistic reality as a part of the literary strategy in Victor Pelevin’s stories “The Crystal World” and “Vera Pavlovna’s Ninth Dream”. Scientific novelty of the study lies in the fact that V. Pelevin’s creative work of the 1990s is barely represented in scientific literature from the perspective of constructing artistic reality in the context of postmodernism. The attained results have demonstrated that V. Pelevin’s early stories are within the unconventional approach to constructing artistic reality, which consists in the synthesis of “objective” and “subjective” realia attributable either to the specifics of a character’s consciousness or to some external force placing these realia at the level of irreality, which is new to the Russian literature.

ЭЛЕМЕНТЫ ВОСТОЧНОЙ ПОЭТИКИ КАК РЕГУЛЯТИВНЫЙ ИНСТРУМЕНТАРИЙ СОВРЕМЕННОГО ЛИТЕРАТУРНОГО ПРОЦЕССА

The article deals with the nature of the synthesis of modern Russian prose and elements of Eastern poetics. On the example of Victor Pelevin’s texts – Т (2009), Batman Apollo (2013), Secret views of Mount Fuji (2018) – the question of functioning in the author’s artistic discourse of the designated signs is objectified. In a special way in V.O. Pelevin’s prose the religious and philosophical aspect of Zen Buddhism as the adjacent direction of East culture is played. Elements of Eastern poetics organize the plot and thematic block of works in a special way. The variant principle of Viktor Pelevin’s writing organically complements the literary process, moving in a spiral of increment of world art practice. Moreover, reading is in a situation of multiple connotations of meanings, as well as a constructive relational assessment of being. Elements of oriental poetics in Pelevin discourse acquire shades of semantic tricks. The synergy of the author’s experiment is also becoming a reception model for the potential reader. An open dialogue, thus, produces the manipulation and synthesis of cultural signs with their own halo of readings. The analysis of the prose of Victor Pelevin confirms the idea that the compilation of different aesthetically world contemplation positions expanding the horizon of meaning, reduplicate the rhizome connotations. It is concluded that the implementation of Eastern poetics in the texts of postmodernism at the level of motives and images objectively concretizes the process of cultural synthesis of modern literature.

Повесть Всеволода Иванова «Возвращение Будды»: символика названия

Since the 19th century, many writers and poets have shown interest in the spiritual values of the East, including India. Buddhism, the religious and philosophical teachings of Gautam Buddha, emerged in India in the First Millennium BC as a reaction against dogmas. It attracted the special attention of many Russian writers, from Leo Tolstoy to the most popular contemporary postmodernist writer, Victor Pelevin; often has been the subject of their creative work. The eminent writer from Siberia, Vsevolod Ivanov, holds a special place among these writers. Throughout his life, he engaged himself in the study of India and Indian spiritual teachings, including Buddhism. His admiration for Eastern philosophy (especially Buddhism) in all probability stemmed from the unique location of his Eurasian native land, which was the merging point of European and Asian culture. In the troubled years of early twentieth century, Vsevolod Ivanov was looking for a solution to the problems of the West (Russia) in Eastern philosophy, and some of his works were woven around this topic. The story “The Return of the Buddha” is one of them. The story deals with the physical and spiritual journey of a few during the turbulent times of the Civil war in Russia. The statue of Buddha is perceived in different ways by the characters accompanying it. For some, the statue signifies the supreme spiritual power, and for others, it is just one of the objects of the material world.