NY Times Magazine, 1/23/00
Gogol À Go-Go
By chronicling the garish excesses of contemporary Russia, the novelist
Victor Pelevin has earned the scorn of the Moscow literary world and the
adulation of the country's youth. By JASON COWLEY
Upon returning to Moscow recently from a stay in a Buddhist monastery in
South Korea, the Russian novelist Victor Pelevin received a surprise phone
call from an Orthodox priest. Why, the patriarch demanded to know, had
Pelevin -- unlike the great Alexander Solzhenitsyn, or the even greater Leo
Tolstoy -- neglected his Christianity? "I told him I hadn't neglected my
Christianity," Pelevin says. "I grew up in an atheist country! He was
unconvinced. He said that because I was popular with the young, I had a
responsibility to set a good example. I was polite to the old man, but his
expectations of me were ridiculous. I'm a writer. I have a responsibility
to no one."
Nearly anywhere else, this remark would seem like a harmless expression of
artistic self-assertion. But no country is more haunted by the spirit of
its dead writers than Russia; even today writers still occupy an emblematic
position in society. Yet just as Moscow has escaped its Communist torpor
for the willful chaos of post-Soviet life, so the Russian image of the
novelist is no longer that of reverent seer or even heroic dissident.
Rather, if anyone embodies the new image of the writer in Russia it is the
38-year-old Pelevin, a laconic semi-recluse with a shaved head, a
fashionable interest in Zen meditation and an eccentric attachment to dark
glasses. (He is seldom seen without them.)
Even as pulp fiction and pornography increasingly fill Moscow bookstalls,
Pelevin has emerged as that unusual thing: a genuinely popular serious
writer. He is almost alone among his generation of Russian novelists in
speaking with a voice authentically his own, and in trying to write about
Russian life in its current idiom. It's a finger-clickingly contemporary
voice: wry, exaggerated, wised-up, amused. His mode of writing about low
life in a high style, his talent for the fantastic and the grotesque and
his interest in drugs, computer games and junk culture have resonated with
a generation for whom the novel was becoming too slow a form. And he is,
unlike many fellow Russian writers whose fiction is largely preoccupied
with the trauma of the Soviet past, not in flight from present
difficulties. In fact, he embraces them with the ruthless ardor of a child
pulling wings off a butterfly.
"Generation P," Pelevin's most recent novel, was a summer sensation in
Russia, selling more than 200,000 copies. (The translation to English is
still being completed.) The book tracks the adventures of a skeptical
intellectual, Vavilen Tatarsky, who becomes a kopiraiter -- an advertising
copywriter -- adrift in a glamorously corrupt Moscow. He spends his days
devising Russian versions of Western slogans: "Gucci for Men -- Be a
European, Smell Better."
The title is clearly a reference to America's jaded Generation X. But what
does the "P" mean? "It could mean any one of three things," Pelevin says.
"It could stand for Pepsi, or Pelevin, or" -- he uses a vulgar Russian
slang term that can be translated loosely as "absolute catastrophe" -- or
all three of these at once." So Pelevin's generation of liberal freedoms
and designer excesses is also the generation of criminality, corruption and
despair. "I feel disgusted by everything about my country," he says. "In
the Soviet times you could escape from the evil of the state by withdrawing
into the private spaces of your own head; but now the evil seems to be
diffused everywhere. We are all tainted by it."
Complete article at:
http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/2123mag-cowley7.html
Louis Proyect
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