Postmodern Theory Reflected in Victor Pelevin’s Fiction
When postmodernism appeared as a literary movement in the 1950s, the USSR has just won the Second World War and still planned on turning the world communist. The Soviet writers at the time had a very different agenda from their American colleagues. They struggled with censorship, not deconstructing reality or the grand narrative. Even after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the post-Soviet writers joined American postmodernism in their own way. They celebrated modernist ideas while creating texts in a postmodern form. One such writer is Victor Pelevin, one of the most popular contemporary writers in Russian-speaking countries.
I want to discuss how postmodern theory was reflected in Pelevin’s fiction and explore how the American postmodern theory mixed with Soviet history and ideas to create Pelevin as a writer. For focus, I will concentrate on Pelevin’s short stories written from 1991 to 2005.
To understand Pelevin as a writer, we need to start by discussing his peculiar biography. He was born in 1962 in Moscow, went to a school specializing in English studies, and became an engineer. He started publishing his works in 1991 on the Internet. He has since won several awards and sold millions of copies of his books. Pelevin as a person is still doubted to exist. He is very private. Pelevin has never shown up to literary award ceremonies or parties. The only people who have actually met him are his childhood friends and teachers, who are the only ones confirming his existence.
Pelevin’s privacy might remind you of Thomas Pynchon, an American postmodernist writer. Pynchon never gave interviews and seldom took pictures. He wanted his books to speak for themselves. When it comes to Pelevin, the reasoning for his privacy is not very clear. It might be connected with his Buddhist worldview, which is reflected in almost all of his works.
Another peculiar fact about Pelevin is that he does not consider himself a postmodernist. To understand his position, we need to describe and explain the differences between American and Russian postmodernism. In 2001, literary critic Mark Lipovetsky divided Russian postmodernism into two branches: conceptualism and neo-baroque. Conceptualism explored the notion between the signifier, the signified, and the referent. However: “While in Western conceptualism one ‘thing’ is substituted with another ‘thing’ or even with the verbal description of a ‘thing,’ … in Russian conceptualism, a ‘thing’ is substituted … with nothingness.” Russian postmodern writers did not see meaning in creating more simulacrums. Baudrillard’s notion of simulacrum was simply too close to Soviet Realism.
The second branch of postmodernism, according to Lipovetsky, is neo-baroque. It is an attempt to mix the high culture with the mass culture. Pelevin, according to Lipovetsky, belongs to the neo-baroque Russian postmodernists. One technique Pelevin uses that makes him neo-baroque is emphasizing irregular unusual fragments without attempting to build the whole world, which we will see later in the research paper. Also, Pelevin uses a dissipative structure in the text, in which pieces of meaning fall apart just to create something new and restore reality.
Unlike American postmodernism, the Russian movement does not oppose modernism. Because modernism occupied itself with the search for meaning and the search for freedom, Russian postmodernists cannot quite give it up yet. This could be the reason why Pelevin does not consider himself a postmodernist. The movement in Russia is yet too interconnected with modernism.
For a Western critic, though, Pelevin’s short stories possess many qualities of the works of American postmodern authors. For example, one of the features of postmodern writing is the ambiguity of space and time, distortion, and fragmentation of reality. For example, in his short story “Sleep” (1991), Pelevin explores the possibility of our world being simply a dream. The protagonist called Nikita Sonechkin (‘son’ means ‘sleep’ in Russian) learns to multitask sleeping with normal activities. He notices everyone else around him is actually multitasking sleeping, too. He decides to talk to a woman on the street about it. She takes Nikita to the police. With the police, Nikita soon forgets what he wanted and remembers he is one of the policemen. The story ends with Nikita on duty seeing the Big Dipper in the sky — something which should not be there in winter.
The story “Sleep” questions the materiality of the world we live in. Pelevin makes the reader consider if our world could be a dream, too. He makes us question what is out there beyond this dream. This idea of multiple realities reminds us of “The Garden of Forking Paths” by Borges. In Pelevin’s case, this idea of multiple realities may reflect on his own existence in the literary sphere. He published his works on the Internet first, and the readers have never seen him. Pelevin has created another reality dimension by simply existing as a literary phenomenon.
Another short story “News from Nepal” (1991) explores the distortion of space and time. “News from Nepal” talks about a Soviet factory worker Lyubochka and her usual work day. She works as an innovation engineer and has to submit regular innovation propositions to the factory management. The story describes the failing communist system of production, where you cannot plan and force creativity. During the story, we start to see cues about the questionable reality of things. For example, Lyubochka met two men in white pajamas outside of her factory. The men talked about the multiple realities when suddenly screamed and ran away. At the end of the story, Lyubochka learns she and her colleagues are actually in hell, and this day has been repeated forever. The story ends with the same sentence it began with — an artistic tool postmodernist writer Nabokov used.
Another tool Pelevin uses in his works is intertextuality and meta-narrative. For example, the short story “The ninth dream of Vera Pavlovna” (1991) is connected to Nikolay Chernyshevky’s novel What is to be Done? (1863) and Fiodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866). The protagonist in the story is Vera Pavlovna, an elderly cleaning lady who works at the city toilet. She discovers the mystery of life with the help of another cleaning lady Manyasha. Vera believes she can now control reality. She transforms her toilet into an elite place, then makes it a shop to work in. She becomes satisfied with her life for a while, but then she starts smelling human excrement everywhere. She thinks it was Manyasha who betrayed her, so she kills her friend with an axe, just like in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. When Vera dies, she is judged by the higher powers and receives a punishment for her actions. Vera Pavlovna becomes one of the characters in Chernyshevky’s novel What is to be Done, and this all becomes her ninth dream in the book.
In “The ninth dream of Vera Pavlovna,” the protagonist believes in solipsism. She rejects reality and believes that her world is what she thinks. Despite her efforts, she is brought back into the reality of the toilet she cleans. She still smells the toilet even if she sees a luxury shop. Once again, Pelevin explores the idea of twisting reality.
The intertextuality is not limited to just two classical Russian novels but includes many movies, musical pieces, and even popular saying at the time (Skvortsova 100). It makes the story culturally and historically rich. Intertextuality in the story serves the purpose of showing how quickly reality was changing in the time of perestroika, as if according to one man’s wish.
Some of Pelevin’s short stories become total pastiche. For example, the short story “Nika” (1992) is a monologue of an older man with a young lover Nika, whom he objectifies completely. Then she cheated on the man, and the man sent her away. He regretted his decision and started looking for Nika. When he found her, she was immediately killed by a car. In this moment, we learn that Nika is a female cat. The reader was played by the author.
This story is ironizing on Nabokov’s “Lolita.” We guess this with small details, for example, Pelevin writes, “I never called her by her full name. The word ‘Veronika’ was a botanical term for me. It reminded me of suffocating white flowers from a southern garden in my childhood” Nabokov wrote, “Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms, she was always Lolita.”
The story reminds us of “Black Venus” by Angela Carter, even though the” literary techniques Carter and Pelevin used are different. While Carter gives her character power and voice, Pelevin further objectifies his character, animalizing her even. Pelevin shows how objectified women are in literature, and how the reader readily puts up with it.
Another postmodern technique Pelevin uses in his work is wordplay. For example, a short story “Uhryb” (1991) talks about a “retired humanitarian” Vasily Maralov (‘marat’ means ‘make something dirty’ in Russian) who gets very drunk and understands the meaning of life. Unfortunately, the next morning, he cannot remember it. He only remembers that it is connected with the word “Uhryb,” which means nothing in Russian. He is so preoccupied with the idea of finding uhryb’s meaning that he starts seeing this word everywhere. He sees it in objects around him, on posters, in other people’s speech. He becomes completely insane and thinks uhryb is a pit of snow he finds in the forest. At the end of the story, Vasily is found dead in that pit.
“Uhryb” explores the absence of meaning in real life which the protagonist decided to find in words or signifiers. “Uhryb” might be a parody of Nabokov’s chapter “Ultima Thule” (1942) from his unfinished novel Solux Rex. In “Ultima Thule,” Nabokov’s protagonist also loses his mind after finding the truth about life. He becomes illogical and reckless.
The lost relationship between the signifier, the signified, and the referent is also illustrated in Pelevin’s story “Built-in Reminder” (1991). The protagonist in the story Niksim is holding an art exhibition guide for several women from the local factory. He talks about an art movement “vibrationalism” and describes it in complex terms, for example, “Pure fixation of ideas will throw us to the exhausted wasteland of conceptualism. On the other hand, the opportunity for vibrationalist interpretation of an object leads to the borders of vibrationalism to blur and stop from existing.” He shows the guests a dummy with a built-in death reminder. The dummy deconstructs itself into pieces until the reminder goes off. As the guide goes on in his speech, his guests are physically shrinking in size until they become dust. The guide collects this dust and throws it away. At the end of the story, he complains about his toothache which does not let him concentrate on vibrationalism. “Built-in reminder” talks about entropy and the gradual deconstruction of objects and reality, which is a common topic in postmodernist literature.
Like some postmodern authors, Pelevin explores the controversial relationship between history and literature. In 1990, he published a story “The Reconstructor (about the research of P. Stetsyuk).” It is a review of a non-existing book Memory of Fire Years by P. Stetsyuk. The book “analyzes” historical archives and concludes that Joseph Stalin was not one but seven different people, one of whom was Nikita Khrushchev. Pelevin is extremely ironic in his short story, for example, he simultaneously says, “You should not read this book because you should not read any books. This book especially” and “Despite [boredom], you should read this book.” Despite the story being in contrast with everything we know about Soviet history, Pelevin is being very serious about his facts and language. He provides links, footnotes, dates, and names in the short story. It all sounds very believable. The short story shows how easy it is to sound reliable, and how a reader should check their facts.
In his short story “The Water Tower” (1990), Pelevin plays with the form of his text, which is a common feature in postmodernism. The whole 13-page story is written in one 2,800-word sentence. Such forms show the continuity and the impossibility to stop the flow of life. In the story, it happens through the images of the building water tower. The story does not describe a physical space. Instead, it only shows images, for example, “ … when you walk along a dirty street with your matches collection and spread snot and blood across your face …” or “ … stretching your hairs across your bald spots and showing your plastic teeth when smiling.” The story begins and ends with the image of the water tower, probably showing life and death.
Some of Pelevin’s stories are simply ironic and fun to read. For example, the short story “The Origin of Species” (1993) describes Charles Darwin on a ship with a crew and many monkeys. To come up with the theory of evolution, Darwin fights with monkeys. He, again and again, proves that he is superior to them and discusses why it happens. “The Origin of Species” discusses the other side of the grand narrative of evolution we know. It explores how the theory could have been produced. As Umberto Eco said, “The postmodern reply to the modern consists of recognizing that the past … must be revisited: but with irony, not innocently.”
Another comical Pelevin’s story is “Mid-Game” (1991). It describes two female prostitutes Lucya and Nelly who struggle with finding clients after the recent fall of the Soviet Union. They meet and decide to look for clients together. They end up getting into trouble: their potential clients appear to be “chess” serial killers Vadim and Valera. When they kill prostitutes, they leave chess figures in their mouths. In the story, this is a billable job for them: when they do it, by some magical forces they decide the end of a chess tournament which really happens somewhere else. This time, the serial killers were unlucky: Lucya and Nelly escaped. They went home to Nelly and suddenly had sex. After that, Nelly told Lucya her story. Nelly is a transwoman who used to be a man called Vasily who worked as the secretary of the district committee of the Komsomol. Lucya was shocked because she is also a transwoman, who used to be Vasily’s colleague. They knew each other in their previous Soviet life. At this point in the story, we jump to the serial killers, by the discussion of whom we understand that they are trans men. Pelevin’s story is ironizing on the process of the Soviet Union’s fall and what it meant for people who were successful in the existing Soviet system. The story also shows the dissipative nature of things and the deconstruction of reality.
In some of Pelevin’s stories, we still see strong features of modernism. For example, “The Ontology of Childhood” (1991) describes a child growing up in prison and not realizing it until he is older. A completely absurd and unreal situation, as in postmodernism, discusses the topic of freedom and the roots of freedom, so frequently in modernism and post-Soviet literature. For Pelevin’s character, freedom ended in childhood, when all things still appeared exciting, adventurous, and as opportunities for storytelling. As an adult, the character did not hear those stories anymore.
As a rising star in Russian literature, Pelevin knowingly or unknowingly implemented so many features of postmodernism in his work that he should be called a postmodern writer. However, he should be called a Russian postmodernist. A feature differentiating Russian postmodernism from American one is that in Russia, the world order still requires interpretation — a feature of American modernist literature. This integration of modernism and postmodernism is what makes Pelevin one of the most well-read contemporary Russian writers. Each of his texts is a precise, ironizing, and sometimes heartbreaking mirror of Russian reality.