Boast ing a rich tradition of utopian/dystopian fiction, Russian literature has seen the most recent burgeoning of the genre in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. With the advancement of Gorbachev's reforms in the mid-1980s, Russian writers engaged in an increasingly open attack on the mythology of Socialist utopia. It was during those years that the negative subgenre of dystopia once again came to the forefront of literature. As the collapse of the Soviet empire seemed more and more imminent, a number of parodic treatments of the Socialist experiment appeared, as well as more somber works concerned with the menaces attending the looming breakdown of the Soviet state. 1 Whether writing in the primarily satiric vein used by Voinovich, Veller, and Aksenov, or in the more wistful spirit exemplified by the Strugatsky brothers in their later oeuvre, the writers of Gorbachev's epoch sought to reinterpret the past and to discern possible venues for the country's future. These attempts continued after the fall of the Soviet Union.This article examines Viktor Pelevin's Generation "П", one of the most conspicuous turn-of-the-century Russian novels. It can be productively analyzed as a fin-de-siècle expression of dystopian imagination. 2
This cluster of articles by Sofya Khagi, Tatiana Filimonova, Daniel Taehun Lee, and Maya Vinokour examines the oeuvre of Victor Pelevin over the last three decades, interrogating his relationship with various forms of power. In the introduction, the authors survey recent scholarship on power in Pelevin’s work, positing the primacy of power in his literary project at various points in his writing career. The articles examine Pelevin’s vision of political, personal, social, economic, and spiritual power as expressed through the philosophical‐aesthetic mode of the sublime, Buddhist spirituality, as well as in the contexts of geopolitics, Russian civilizationism, and Anglo‐American Neo‐Reactionary thought. A resonant voice in contemporary Russian prose, Pelevin engages with influential philosophical, political, and aesthetic discourses inside and outside post‐Soviet space—if not deconstructing their power, then at least planting seeds of doubt in his readers’ minds.
The importance of Arkadii and Boris Strugatskii in Soviet science fiction has been thoroughly examined. A less-explored question concerns how they have continued to inspire post-Soviet authors who muse on an environment that differs drastically from the one that gave rise to their works. Sofya Khagi explores how prominent contemporary writers—Garros-Evdokimov (Aleksandr Garros and Aleksei Evdokimov), Dmitrii Bykov, and Viktor Pelevin—examine the Strugatskiis to dramatize their own darker visions of modernization, progress, and morality. They continue the tradition of science fiction as social critique—in this case, a critique of society after the collapse of socialist ideology with its modernizing projects of historical progress, technological development, and social improvement. According to their parables a contrario to the Strugatskiis, the dreams of modernity embodied by the classics of Soviet fantastika have been shattered but not replaced by a viable alternative social scenario. As they converse with their predecessors, contemporary writers examine stagnation, not just in post-Soviet Russia, but in global, postmodern, commodified reality.
This essay distinguishes flight as a salient trope throughout multiple Pelevin texts: Omon Ra (1992), Chapaev and the Void (1996), Generation P (1999), Empire V (2006), and Love for Three Zuckerbrins (2014). It examines flight through the aesthetics of the sublime—classical, (post)‐Soviet, and postmodern. The “aerial sublime” focuses on the motifs of flight, elevation, and their reversal such as descent and going underground. Through this analysis, the essay offers an entry point to the question of Pelevin’s preoccupation with the subject’s relation to power—political, military, and capital‐, media‐, or technology‐driven. The airborne protagonist is positioned in spatial counterpoint to tyrannical social and cosmic forces. One may remain in their clutches or escape, withdraw, comically yield, or pragmatically acquiesce. Pelevin’s aerial sublime grows increasingly bleak: from an internalized ethical experience to active thought work without resolution, touching the noumenal, or ethical to the apotheosis of the non‐reasoning, non‐ethical, and inhuman. That is, his later works envision the sublime transformed into an anti‐sublime through power annihilating the human as a sentient and ethical agent. Pelevin’s aerial sublime thereby conveys lessons about ironclad social and cosmic mechanics and the subject that is constituted, coerced, and occasionally resistant to it.
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