Illusion — Money — Illusion: Viktor Pelevin and the 'Closed Loop' of the Vampire Novel

Abstract

A brief contextual discussion is presented of the Russian history of the vampire genre and its spiritual critique of the human condition in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, encompassing texts by Gogol, Turgenev and Bulgakov, as well as the well-known Dozor teratology by Sergei Luk'ianenko). It addresses the question of whether the vampire in this context is principally Romantic transgressor, moral object lesson, political metaphor, or capitalist bloodsucker. The principal focus of the article is Viktor Pelevin's 2008 novel Ampir V (Empire V), set in a new Russian empire of 'benevolent' slavery, in which humans are prey to the vampires who live amongst them. The argument is that Pelevin's novel addresses issues such as political predation, capitalism, and consciousness; the mind-capital link can be analysed within a broadly Jamesonian/Deleuzian model of consciousness under late capitalism. Pelevin uses vampires, hidden creatures of the night, to divine the darkness of self-delusion, asking what one might know and how one might know it, given a world of illusions, shadows, and deception. Although (briefly) acknowledging the forces of faith and of love, he concludes that addiction to illusion is the human condition; thus Pelevin's formulation of human destiny as 'illusion-money-illusion'.