The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Pelevin’s work has been described as a “satirico-philosophical fantasy” as well as a “mix of super-science fiction and harsh realism.”34 In Chapter 1 we briefly mentioned the hero of Pelevin’s first novel Omon Ra (1992), Omon Krivomazov [“Crooked-smear”], who thinks he is training as a cosmonaut. He has enrolled in the Meresyev Flying School, named after Aleksei Meresyev, the legendary World War II pilot who continued to fly sorties after having lost both his legs in combat (a deed immortalized in Boris Polevoy’s socialist realist classic Story of a Real Man [1946] and in Prokofiev’s opera of the same name [1948]). Omon’s flight instructor welcomes the entering class by recalling Meresyev’s heroism: “after losing his legs, he didn’t lose heart, he rose up again on artificial legs and soared into the sky like Icarus to strike at the Nazi scum! . . . and we will make Real Men of you too in the shortest possible time.”35 Indeed: the school’s initiation ritual for each new trainee involves amputating the feet (or legs: the Russian word noga refers to both foot and leg, so it is unclear how far up the surgery extends). The reference to Icarus is apt. Like Platonov’s Foundation Pit, the higher the deception soars, the more subterranean and awful the reality. The Soviet space program is being run by cripples and trick cameras from the Moscow Metro – the pride of Stalinist construction, built partly by slave labor, here revealed as a shabby, deceptive, muddy maze of tunnels.

Life and death in their physiological dimension are not easily distinguishable in Pelevin’s later work. A devoted Buddhist, Pelevin gives us one lucid Eastern parable, The Yellow Arrow (1993), in which a sealed train carrying a cross section of late communist society is heading toward a ruined bridge. The hero, who manages to crawl up to the roof of a train car and look around (passengers are allowed to do this, but most aren’t interested), suddenly “wakes up.” This interrupts the Chain of Being. The train stops, time stops, bubbles are suspended in a glass of liquid; he gets off and walks into a dusty unmarked wilderness.

The most complex intersection that Pelevin makes with the Russian literary tradition is his 1996 novel Chapayev and Emptiness (1996, first appearing in English as The Clay Machine Gun, then retitled Buddha’s Little Finger). It links Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, a bit of Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, the 1919–21 Civil War, Stalinist-era heroism and kitsch, Eastern mysticism (real and bogus), and the venerable tradition of alternative truths accessible only in the madhouse. The hero, Peter Emptiness [Pyotr Pustota] is, as far as we can tell, a suspect writer trying to avoid arrest. He lives simultaneously in two times,

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Moscow of the 1990s and the post-revolutionary Civil War circa 1919. Pyotr’s first assignment as a recruit of the Bolshevik secret police is to raid (read: shoot the audience in) a Symbolist cafe´, where some poets are putting on a little play called “Raskolnikov and Marmeladov” in the style of Chekhov’s Seagull. One of those famous poets, Valery Bryusov, asks Pyotr if he’s found time yet to read Blok’s The Twelve. Pyotr says yes – but “What is Christ doing walking in front of the patrol? Does Blok perhaps wish to crucify the revolution?”36 Pyotr wakes up from that politically fraught nightmare in an asylum for the insane. As with the Master’s weirdly engineered fate in Bulgakov’s novel, however, this asylum is no torture chamber; it is a modern clinic equipped with the most humane drugs and cutting-edge cures, including dream therapy.

As the novel progresses, an Eastern element begins to displace the Dosto-evskian.During further dreams in theasylum, Pyotr becomes a discipleofVasily Chapayev (1887–1919), peasant commander for the Red Army on the Far Eastern front. Structurally, the Chapayev legend functions for Pelevin somewhat as the Jerusalem chapters and Yeshua/Jesus do for Bulgakov in that equally layered novel. The historical Chapayev, cut down in battle, was revered as a secular martyr of the Revolution and became part of its holy writ, a Stalinist icon adapted for stage, screen, and opera. But Pelevin returns Chapayev to his true guise as Buddhist seer. By the end of the novel, on the edge of discovering “inner Mongolia,” all matter is about to pass away.