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3 It is not difficult to detect behind this forgery, now more than 70 years old, the activity of well-financed and aggressive forces which were interested in concealing the truth about Chapaev from the peoples of Eurasia. . . . the very discovery of the present manuscript seems to us a clear indication that the balance of power on the continent has shifted. —¾ELEVIN, Chapaev and the Void (1996) AM O NG the most popular novels in post-Soviet Russia, Viktor Pelevin ’s Chapaev and the Void (Chapaev i pustota, 1996), starts with a preface by an imaginary editor, who addresses his readers as the “peoples of Eurasia”—they are not Russians nor is Russia a place on the map.1 The novel’s title refers to the popular Civil War hero Vasily Chapaev, the commander made famous in a 1923 novel, a 1930s film, and hundreds of jokes. Pelevin’s editor wants to bring his readers the “truth about Chapaev,” that “has been hidden for too long from the peoples of Eurasia” (ChP, 9). The novel about Chapaev that then follows consists of the edited notes of the avant-garde poet-philosopher Petr Pustota (whose name means Peter Void or Peter Emptiness)—whom the historical Russian world knows and loves as Chapaev’s soldierly sidekick Petia. Against all expectations, this playful novel portrays Chapaev as a cultivated Buddhist guru just playacting as the headstrong but brilliant cavalry officer Chapaev of Soviet times. Pustota claims to have finished his notes between 1923 and 1925 in the Central Asian (fantasy) locale of Kafka Yurt, close to the same time as Dmitry Furmanov wrote his canonical Socialist Realist epic, Chapaev. Pustota’s story is complicated by the fact that it proceeds in two different historical moments, though we readers are never fully sure which time, if any, is the “real” one. Although Petr wants his readers to believe that his story takes Citations from Viktor Pelevin’s Chapaev i Pustota (Moscow: Vagrius, 2000) are given in the text, using the acronym “ChP” and page number(s). The title of the English translation is Buddha’s Little Finger, trans. A. Bromfield (New York: Penguin, 2001). All translations are my own. 1. Konstantin Kedrov, “Knizhnyi reiting,” Izvestiia, 4 July 1997), http://dlib.eastview.com. www2.lib.ku.edu:2048/sources/article.jsp?id=3159193. ILLUSORY EMPIRE Viktor Pelevin’s Parody of N eo-Eurasianism ¿L L U SO RY ÀM P I R E 69 place in 1919, he has to deal with a competing story that makes him an inmate in a Moscow mental hospital around the time of the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. The same is true of space depicted in Chapaev and the Void. The editor never mentions Russia as such, and in the novel Petr mentions Russia only once in a heated philosophical debate about consciousness, mind, and body. The familiar territory of Russia and its twentieth-century counterpart, the Soviet Union, is replaced by a number of dislocated spaces, both real and recognizable (e.g., Moscow) and imaginary (e.g., Eurasia), which will turn out to be a disparate handful of imagined spaces in someone’s fantasy. It is important that the editor thinks of the anticipated readership for Petr Pustota’s story as Eurasian rather than Russian. Russia as such exists here more or less as a sad joke in a philosophical dialogue. The reference to Eurasia in the preface recalls the post-Soviet surge of enthusiasm for neo-Eurasianism among some ultraconservative political circles. Just the mention of this marked geographical space invites a reading of the novel as a response to Aleksandr Dugin’s loud neo-Eurasianist expressions of imperial nostalgia, of a renewed desire for geopolitical centrality, for power and security.2 This chapter focuses on themes crucial to Pelevin’s Chapaev and the Void, the deconstruction of the Soviet mass psyche and the search for identity. Contemporary neo-Eurasianism with its national-imperial idea is an ideological straw man that receives wonderful philosophical and psychological satirical treatment in this novel. Among its delightful features are a series of zany philosophical dialogues variously about consciousness, ethics, and metaphysics—and always about identity. The post-Soviet tendency to link identity to spatial-geographical metaphor, becomes here the object of a fundamental philosophical challenge. Set partly in a Moscow mental hospital, Pelevin’s Chapaev parody lends itself to a psychoanalytic challenge to the repressive neo-Eurasianist view of human nature. Here the focus...

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