Victor Pelevin is one of the most widely read and debated writers to emerge from the post-Soviet world, yet his work speaks far beyond it. This volume offers the first in-depth account of Pelevin as a simultaneously post-Soviet and global author, demonstrating how his fiction mediates between local experience and global, even cosmic systems of power, control, and belief.
Moving beyond readings that cast him either as a postmodernist chronicler of the post-Soviet condition or fully assimilate him into familiar Western paradigms, the contributors demonstrate how his writing constantly navigates between these frameworks. Pelevin's novels and stories explore a world shaped by multinational capitalism, digital networks of communication, conspiracy thinking, and metaphysical doubt, while remaining firmly rooted in the experience of the post-Soviet transformation. Bringing together international scholars, the volume offers complementary and critical perspectives on Pelevin's literary qualities, evolving concerns, and the shifting politics of his prose, integrating works that have never been translated.
Taken together, the contributions to this volume present Pelevin as a writer who can be read as iconoclastic, polemical, conformist, or self-reflexive. Yet above all, Pelevin emerges as a writer who is uniquely attuned to the contemporary zeitgeist.
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments
Part I: Philosophy, Metaphysics, and Myth
Introduction: Pelevin and Global Culture
Tatiana Filimonova, Sofya Khagi, and Boris Noordenbos
Chapter 1: Inner and Outer Spaces: A Claustrophobic Reading of Viktor Pelevin’s Omon Ra
Sibelan Forrester
Chapter 2: Sacrifice and the Economy of Violence in Pelevin’s Fiction
Sofya Khagi
Chapter 3: Reconfiguring the Russian Imperial Legacy: Victor Pelevin’s Iakinf as a Neo-Gothic Story
Alexandra Smith
Chapter 4: Nihilism and Gnosticism in Victor Pelevin’s Transhumanism, Inc.
Lina Steiner
Chapter 5: Outgrowing Hamlet: Cynical Humanism in Victor Pelevin’s Empire V
Meghan Vicks
Part II: Conspiracy and the Politics of Critique
Chapter 6: The Path of Post-paranoia in Victor Pelevin’s Recent Work
Keith A. Livers
Chapter 7: The Conspiratorial Sublime: Mapping Power Trans-historically in Victor Pelevin’s Operation “Burning Bush” (2010) and Methuselah’s Lamp (2016)
Boris Noordenbos
Chapter 8: Victor Pelevin and the Noosphere
Tatiana Filimonova
Chapter 9: History, Sovereignty, and Political Legitimacy in Victor Pelevin’s Caretaker (2015) and Undefeatable Sun (2020)
Maya Vinokour
Chapter 10: Viktor Pelevin’s Joyless Tricksters
Mark Lipovetsky
Chapter 11: Disavowal in Pelevin’s Recent Reception
Lisa Ryoko Wakamiya
Index
About the Author :
Tatiana Filimonova is assistant professor of Russian at Dartmouth College.
Sofya Khagi is professor of Russian literature at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Boris Noordenbos is associate professor of literary and cultural analysis at University of Amsterdam.
