The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Like Petrushevskaya from an earlier generation, in turning his lens on the body with its undignified products, Sorokin forces us to see how the spirit is trapped in matter. In his 2002 novel Ice [Lyod], about a millenarian sect in

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search of its secret members, the 23,000 “True People” are revealed only when struck on the chest with an ice hammer and forced to utter their real names. These awakened ones are carriers of the primeval Light, which will return to the Cosmos as soon as matter (death giving birth to death) is dissolved. Sorokin’s primary concern is everywhere to disentangle language from the body, to lay bare the workings of each, and to resist one being casually or thoughtlessly reproduced by the other.

Our second exemplary post-Soviet writer, Viktor Pelevin (b. 1962), also toys with Stalinist ruins and also denies any political intent. But he is not, in the brutal corporeal way we have just sampled, a “materialist.” Like the mystical Symbolists of the 1910s–20s, Pelevin builds his works “on the windowsill” between different worlds.31 His technique is one of constantly switching perspectives, back and forth across both sides of the sill. He resists writing on specifically “Russian subject matter”; in fact, he says, subject matter as such does not exist.32 He doesn’t care for Sorokin and considers postmodernism overall to be “like eating the flesh of a dead culture.” Influenced by the philosopher Nicolas Berdyaev and the Symbolist poet Aleksandr Blok, Pelevin has pursued a single question, to which the politics of post-communism contributes only tangentially: what is reality, and where must one stand to gain access to it? He gives the reader very few clues, and none at all from his personal biography.33 Contrary to the heroic Dostoevsky–Tolstoy–Solzhenitsyn model, where one’s life openly nourishes one’s art, Pelevin cultivates the image of a mystic recluse: rarely appearing in public, disappearing for long stretches of time (often to Tibet), and almost never granting interviews (only contradictory press statements). One suspects that this is the sort of biographical image Gogol would have cultivated, had he the means, managerial skill, and technology.

Pelevin’s first route to “reality” was science fiction. But he goes further than Gogol in “The Nose” or Bulgakov in Heart of a Dog. Both those masters of the grotesque remain within the realm of the human, or at least of the animate. One early Pelevin story, “The Life and Adventures of Shed Number XII” (1991), concerns the coming to consciousness of a storage shed, a delicate process dependent upon its contents (bicycles or barrels of brine). When the bikes are moved out and the pickle-barrels take over, the shed commits suicide. Like Akaky Akakievich, the shed returns to haunt its owner, in the form of a spectral bicycle. Pelevin’s oscillation between equally valid, utterly different worlds is more clinical than uncanny. His 1994 novel The Life of Insects, populated by mosquitoes, dung beetles, flying ants, and moths, has been compared with Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” but the analogy is inexact. Kafka’s Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning as a beetle and remains one until his miserable death.

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Pelevin manages to show us a bloodsucking mosquito who is at the same time a New Russian businessman, back and forth in the same scene and even from the same balcony – and a sexy housefly Natasha who flirts, sunbathes, and sips a drink full-size, only seconds before ending up as a speck on restaurant flypaper.