The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

From the first Thaw to the end 243

Moscow of the 1990s and the post-revolutionary Civil War circa 1919. Pyotr’s first assignment as a recruit of the Bolshevik secret police is to raid (read: shoot the audience in) a Symbolist cafe´, where some poets are putting on a little play called “Raskolnikov and Marmeladov” in the style of Chekhov’s Seagull. One of those famous poets, Valery Bryusov, asks Pyotr if he’s found time yet to read Blok’s The Twelve. Pyotr says yes – but “What is Christ doing walking in front of the patrol? Does Blok perhaps wish to crucify the revolution?”36 Pyotr wakes up from that politically fraught nightmare in an asylum for the insane. As with the Master’s weirdly engineered fate in Bulgakov’s novel, however, this asylum is no torture chamber; it is a modern clinic equipped with the most humane drugs and cutting-edge cures, including dream therapy.

As the novel progresses, an Eastern element begins to displace the Dosto-evskian.During further dreams in theasylum, Pyotr becomes a discipleofVasily Chapayev (1887–1919), peasant commander for the Red Army on the Far Eastern front. Structurally, the Chapayev legend functions for Pelevin somewhat as the Jerusalem chapters and Yeshua/Jesus do for Bulgakov in that equally layered novel. The historical Chapayev, cut down in battle, was revered as a secular martyr of the Revolution and became part of its holy writ, a Stalinist icon adapted for stage, screen, and opera. But Pelevin returns Chapayev to his true guise as Buddhist seer. By the end of the novel, on the edge of discovering “inner Mongolia,” all matter is about to pass away.

Chapayev and Emptiness is a seriocomic pastiche of Russian fantasies about space: upper, lower, outer, across, the unmappable Eurasian frontier and physical volume that does not have to obey the laws of Western materialism. It is, in its way, a postmodernist sunken city of Kitezh. Inevitably, Pelevin’s project has been associated with Marshall McLuhan’s media extravaganzas and with the French theorist of simulacra and simulations, Jean Baudrillard. But as one astute student of the current literary scene has observed, “Pelevin is interested not in the transformation of reality into simulacra but rather in the reverse process: the birth of reality out of simulacra. This strategy is the polar opposite of the major postulates of postmodernist philosophy.”37

Pelevin’s quasi-parodic mysticism and skill at bringing low philosophically highbrow plots have made him a bestseller, with a growing reputation outside Russia. However, both Pelevin’s Buddhism for the masses and Sorokin’s alleged pornography were eclipsed in the first years of the twenty-first century by the runaway impact of the most prolific practitioner of Russia’s fastest-growing genre, the detektiv or detective novel: the Moscow-based, Georgian-Jewish B.[oris] Akunin, pen name of Grigory Chkhartishvili (b. 1958). (The “Bakunin” connection in this pen name is clear; less evident, perhaps, is that