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/20000123mag-cowley7.html Louis Proyect Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/
