Viktor Pelevin’s Postmodern Apocalypse
Keywords:
apocalypse, сontemporary Russian literature, Pelevin, Platonov, Porshnev
Abstract
This article is devoted to the work of the leading living Russian prose writer, Viktor Pelevin, in the context of the image and idea of world’s end that is so present in his writings. In many of Pelevin’s novels, a fictional world that the reader first accepts turns out to be a deliberate creation of this or that demiurge, realistically depicted as spin doctor. Apocalypse is thus rendered in a Gnostic/Buddhist manner. What is specific for Pelevin against a background of the postmodern and cyberpunk genres he continues, is the elaboration of an antiworld symbolic weapon, a formula that counters a world so as to make it perish. The main reason for this motif is the desire to protect/shelter oneself—and the reader—from the violence of language that remains authoritative even in absence of any public authority.
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Virilio, Paul (2005). The Information Bomb. London: Verso.
Virno, Paolo (2013). Saggio sulla negazione: per un’antropologia linguistica. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri.
Žižek, Slavoj (1991). For They Know Not What They Do. London: Verso.
Bethea, David (1989). The Shape of Apocalypse in Modern Russian Fiction. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Blanchot, Maurice (1995). The Writing of the Disaster [1980]. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Blok, Alexander (1950). “Puppet Show.” The Slavonic and East European Review 28.71: 309–22.
Brodsky, Joseph (1986). Less Than One. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroud.
Čapek, Karel (1996). War with the Newts. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Čapek, Karel (2004). R.U.R (Rossum’s Universal Robots). London: Penguin.
DaltonBrown, Sally (2014). “Looking For The Creator: Pelevin And The Impotent Writer In T (2009) and Ananasnaia voda dlia prekrasnoi damy (2011).” The Modern Lan- guage Review 109.1: 199–218.
Freud, Sigmund (1958). Collected Works, Vol. 12, Standard Edition. London: Hogarth Press.
Galt, Rosalind (2015). “The Suffering Spectator? Perversion and Complicity in Antichrist and Nymphomaniac.” Theory and Event 18.2. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/578636
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang (1994). From My Life: Poetry and Truth. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Greenberg, Clement (1939). “AvantGarde and Kitsch.” Partisan Review, 6 (Fall): 34–49.
Heidegger, Martin (2008). “What is Metaphysics?” In Basic Writings, 89–110. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Thought.
Jameson, Fredric (1991). Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Kandinsky, Wassily (1999). Concerning the Spiritual in Art. New York: Dover.
LacoueLabarthe, Philippe (1999). Poetry as Experience. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Lipovetsky, Mark (1997). Russkii postmodernizm. Ocherki istoricheskoi poetiki [Russian postmodernism. Essays in historical poetics]. Ekaterinburg: UGPU.
Lipovetsky, Mark (2008). Paralogii: transformatsii (post)modernistskogo diskursa v russkoi kul'ture 1990–2000-kh godov [Paralogies: the transformations of Postmodernist discourse in the Russian culture of the 19902000s]. Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie.
Löwith, Karl (2011). Meaning in History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lukács, Georg (1971). History and Class Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Magun, Artemy (2010). “Otritsatel'naia revoliutsiia Andreia Platonova” [Andrey Platonov’s negative revolution]. Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie 106: 56–88.
Magun, Artemy (2017). “Boris Porshnev’s Dialectic of History.” Stasis 5.2 (forthcoming).
McGinn, Bernard (2011). Antichrist: Two Thousand Years of the Human Fascination with Evil. New York: Columbia University Press.
Nabokov, Vladimir (1990). The Defense. New York: Vintage Books.
Nabokov, Vladimir (2012a). Invitation to a Beheading. London: Penguin.
Nabokov, Vladimir (2012b). Pale Fire. London: Penguin.
Nabokov, Vladimir (2012c). Transparent Things. London: Penguin.
Pelevin, Viktor (2001). Buddha’s Little Finger. New York: Penguin Books.
Pelevin, Viktor (2002). Homo Zapiens. New York: Viking.
Pelevin, Viktor (2003). Dialektika perekhodnogo perioda iz niotkuda v nikuda [Dialectic of a transitional period from nowhere to nowhere]. Moscow: Eksmo.
Pelevin, Viktor (2009a). Sacred Book of the Werewolf. New York: Penguin Books.
Pelevin, Viktor (2009b). T. Moscow: Eksmo.
Pelevin, Viktor (2011a). “AntiAir Complexes of AlEfesbi” [in Russian]. In Ananasnaia voda dlia prekrasnoi damy [Pineapple water for a fair lady], 145–236. Moscow: Eksmo.
Pelevin, Viktor (2011b). “Operation ‘Burning Bush’” [in Russian]. In Ananasnaia voda dlia prekrasnoi damy [Pineapple water for a fair lady], 7–144. Moscow: Eksmo.
Pelevin, Viktor (2014a). Love of Three Zukerbrins. Moscow: Eksmo.
Pelevin, Viktor (2014b). S.N.U.F.F. Moscow: Eksmo.
Pelevin, Viktor (2016). Empire V. The Prince of Hamlet. London: Gollancz.
Platonov, Andrei (1978). Chevengur. Trans. Anthony Olcott. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis.
Platonov, Andrei (1994). The Foundation Pit. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Platonov, Andrei (2000). Zapisnye knizhki [Notebooks]. Moscow: IMLI RAN.
Platonov, Andrei (2008). Soul: And Other Stories. Trans. Robert and Elizabeth Chandler and Angela Livingstone. New York: New York Review Books Classics.
Platonov, Andrei (2011). Sobranie sochinenii [Collected works]. Moscow: Vremia.
Pomerantsev, Peter (2014). Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia. New York: Public Affairs.
Porshnev, Boris (2007). O nachale chelovecheskoĭ istorii [On the origin of human history]. Saint Petersburg: Aletheya.
Taubes, Jacob (2009). Eschatologie occidentale. Paris: Éditions de l’éclat.
Virilio, Paul (2005). The Information Bomb. London: Verso.
Virno, Paolo (2013). Saggio sulla negazione: per un’antropologia linguistica. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri.
Žižek, Slavoj (1991). For They Know Not What They Do. London: Verso.
Published
2017-07-24
How to Cite
Magun, A. (2017). Viktor Pelevin’s Postmodern Apocalypse. Stasis, 5(1). https://doi.org/10.33280/2310-3817-2017-5-1-86-102
Section
Thematic Articles
Copyright (c) 2017 Stasis
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
