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Gerald McCausland Viktor Pelevin and the End of Sots-Art A SOVIET YOUTH, Omon Krivomazov, realizes his dream ofbeing admitted to a military college for future pilots. On the day of his arrival at the Mares'ev Red Banner Flying School, he and his fellow firstyear cadets are greeted by their trainers and are promised that they will be made into "real men" in the spirit of the legendary flyer whose name the college bears.l Unknown to the boys, they are then drugged during the evening meal, after which they all collapse into their beds. Upon wakening in pain the next day, most of them find that their legs have been amputated at the knees during the night. Their transformation into real men has begun. This is a striking but typical scene from Orrwn Ra, Viktor Pelevin's first novel. Pelevin is almost certainly the most widely read author currently writing in Russia. His works are steadily published and republished in Russia and have been translated into several foreign languages. He is avidly read by younger readers as well as by the traditional audience for "serious literature ." It is tempting to see in Pelevin the first major representative of a truly new Russian literature, a literature that would be more than simply "postSoviet ." His stories and novels combine an untypical playfulness with Russian literature's frequent pretension to philosophizing, which has traditionally made literature a kind of moral compass for the country. It is this strange combination of playfulness and pretension that has apparently led to his wide popularity, as well to the controversy that often surrounds the publication of every Significant new work.2 But as the scene above illustrates, this new young writer is still very much a post-Soviet writer inasmuch as he continues the long tradition ofexploiting the discarded cultural refuse ofthe Soviet era for his own ends. Here I will attempt to analyze this "Soviet leftover" in Pelevin's works and its particular relation to the sots-art movement in the late Soviet period. Before examining his specific uses of Soviet culture, it is necessary to make some general observations about Pelevin's writing. Like so many ofthe postmodernists that came before him, Pelevin's writing often seems to concern itself with the ontology of the world around us, the reliability and the very status of our perception and of our ability to account for what we per225 Gerald McCausland ceive. Some of his most successful stories are those in which the diegetic reality of the narrative is rendered with minute precision, and yet the perception of the reader is suddenly revealed to be completely mistaken. In "Hermit and Six-Toes" ["Zatvornik i Shestipalyi"]' the reader is introduced to a wild and desolate landscape, perhaps an abandoned construction site, which seems to be located outside the limits of an urban community ofsome sort. The two individuals named in the title are engaged in conversation touching on philosophy and politics as well as the mundane minutiae of everyday life. After some extended dialogue, Hermit explains that he has traveled much and has gained some inSight into the nature of the world and of "the gods." There are in fact a multitude of worlds, he says, all contained within a universe bearing the name "Lunacharskii Broiler Combine." Hermit explains: 'There are seventy worlds altogether in the universe. We are in one of them at the moment. These worlds are fastened to an endless black belt, which moves slowly in a circle. Above it, on the surface ofthe sky, there are hundreds ofidentical suns. They do not move over us, it is we who move below them. Try to picture it" (Blue Lantern 31).3 The reader suddenly realizes that the action of the story takes place not on the outskirts of a city but in a poultry plant and that the two protagonists are not outcasts from human society, but young chickens destined for slaughter. This kind of sudden realization makes up a large part of the pleasure in reading Pelevin's texts. In the case of "Hermit and Six-Toes," the reader resembles the philosophers and astronomers before Galileo, who attempted to describe and understand the universe based on their own sense perceptions . Pelevin leads us to distrust the manifest world in its physical appearance and to seek the true nature of things beyond their material reality. There is an entire subgroup of stories by Pelevin that are centered around such sudden revelations for which...

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