The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

242 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Pelevin manages to show us a bloodsucking mosquito who is at the same time a New Russian businessman, back and forth in the same scene and even from the same balcony – and a sexy housefly Natasha who flirts, sunbathes, and sips a drink full-size, only seconds before ending up as a speck on restaurant flypaper.

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,