New Russia, Let’s Hear You

In a time of huge change in Russia, critics yearn for the next great voice – a latter-day Dostoevsky/Tolstoy/Nabokov who will document the feelings of ‘Generation P.’ Alas the much-lauded Victor Pelevin fails to hit the spot for Bridget Hourican

Victor Pelevin
The Sacred Book of the Werewolf
Were-d but not weird enough

If you like books at all, the words ‘Russian writer’ will have a mystic allure, the way ‘Sun Records’ does for rock lovers, and ‘Provence’ for painters. You may argue between the merits of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Nabokov, Bulgakov or Solzhenitsyn, but it’s an argument about giants. John Banville said somewhere that all writers are trying to escape the influence of the Russians.

So at a time like this, when Russia is very powerful and very interesting, when its oligarchs are buying football teams, when the State seems to be assassinating its critics and the ski slopes and beach resorts of Europe are full of impossibly glamorous New Russians, then lovers of literature feel a spark of excitement.

What have the writers to say about this? What fresh, amazing voice will the Riddle-Wrapped-in-a-Mystery-Inside-an-Enigma give us now? Like the Magi, we critics are reverently, passionately awaiting the miracle birth.

Two contemporary Russian writers have penetrated Western consciousness. Boris Akunin, creator of Erast Fandorin, writes detective stories, set in the 19th Century, that are part Sherlock Holmes and part George MacDonald Fraser, with a whiff of Nietzsche. It’s not hard to understand Akunin’s success, and good luck to him, but his slick, derivative books are no miracle birth.

The other is Victor Pelevin, who shot to fame after the break-up of the Soviet Union. He’s now 46, has written at least 12 novels which have been translated into 33 languages, and is a true, hermetic, international, literary star. Like Beckett and Salinger, he doesn’t give interviews; he is never seen without dark sunglasses and when he talks it’s to utter gnomic aphorisms (he’s big into Zen Buddhism).

I have been hearing about Pelevin for years – when I was teaching English in St Petersburg in 1997 my students were raving about him; he’s so hip that even those who don’t read him reference him. But somehow I never got round to his books until now. Faber is translating his oeuvre. The Sacred Book of the Werewolf came out in Russia three years ago.

It is a surreal and satirical fable. The narrator, A Hu-Li, is a werefox, a shape-changer who has lived thousands of years. At time of narrative she is working as a prostitute in today’s Russia. Her human form is that of a 14-year-old Lolita, her mind that of a Buddhist monk/ Emo kid.

She takes up with a werewolf who has, of course, a high-up job with the FSB (the post-Soviet successor to the KGB), and theirs is a love story, which ends, of course, sadly. The narrative device allows Pelevin to make all kinds of satirical attacks on modern Russia – probably far more than I could pick up, though points about political corruption, oil companies and nouveau riche were obvious enough.

Pelevin is an offshoot of the surrealist branch of Russian literature – similarities to Gogol and Bulgakov are manifest. Kafka gets in there too. But what A Hu-Li’s journey reminded me of most was a cyber game. She seems like the kind of character – tough, sexy, wise-cracking, with magic powers – that a 14-year-old boy would create. She moves through a series of adventures, causing destruction and pausing to philosophise. No doubt the cyber quality of his work is what helps make him so hip with Russia’s ‘Generation P’ (so-called after one of Pelevin’s books).

The book is an exciting, glamorous read, with erotica, cults, subterfuges, Zen philosophy, nihilism and ancient history thrown together in a sexy mix. But ultimately it’s as empty as a cyber game. It takes you on and on and brings you nowhere.

Pelevin isn’t really a satirist. He doesn’t have the ice-cold rage of Swift, Waugh, Gogol or Flann O’Brien. The humour of satirists has to be pitched on cold, despairing ground if it’s to remain taut. Pelevin is really an Orientalist. Like the Beatles and other 1960s flower-children, he thinks salvation lies in the teachings of Oriental philosophy.

The end of The Sacred Book of the Werewolf seems to be an instruction on how to reach Nirvana, and it has the irritating, smug, preachy quality which is not a feature of Tibetan Buddhism but which seems to attach itself to Western practitioners. Sure, it’s wittier, racier and more inventive, but otherwise it is just The Alchemist for Generation P.

This is a huge disappointment. Pelevin is prolific so he may just be having an off-day – apparently Omon Ra is the one to get – but I don’t think that’s it. Even in lesser works, a writer’s style comes through. Pelevin is not the next Great Russian writer. We have to keep on waiting. (S/he is probably somewhere in Novosibirsk and untranslated.)