One of most interesting and representative literary figures to
emerge from the confusion of post-Soviet culture is Viktor Pelevin.
Although his roots lie in the literary tradition of the
past—Gogol&soft;, Dostoevskij, and more recently Bulgakov and
Sinjavskij—Pelevin's unusual prose is thoroughly entwined with
the concerns and preoccupations of the present day. At once postmodern
in its assertion of a multi-leveled ontology
—of
an infinitely unfolding progression of loosely boundaried and
bordering realities, consciousnesses and the diverse narratives that
produce them—Pelevin's novel is at the same time strikingly
traditionalist in its penchant for moralism and fable-like
didacticism. Pelevin, in his novel samopoznanie geroja v situacii ploxoj
dejstvitel&soft;nosti.
If the work as a whole concerns the
search for identity in the chaos of life after Lenin, its protagonists
can be divided into two categories: a philosophically-inclined central
protagonist (who is at the same time the writer's alter-ego) and the
host of common insects whose attempts to articulate a self end in
disaster. What unites them is a refrain common in today's climate of
political and social instability in Russia: Kuda èto ja
idu?
As Judith Butler has so convincingly shown, steep changes
in political/social geography invariably breed multiple and desperate
attempts to reinscribe the contours of the body social in one of the
few remaining loci of stability; i.e., the individual body. In
Pelevin's insect world the search for self is most often channeled
into the ephemeral pursuit of corporeal identification. Blood, the
erect phallus, or even the genetic codes passed from parent to
child—all become the means of recovering what is most painfully,
insistently absent: an identity beyond ideology.
In the present paper I focus particular attention on those
strategies of identity-formation which are essentially cannibalistic;
in other words, they literally subsist on ready-made textual or
corporeal identities in a futile attempt to prop up a flagging sense
of self. To the extent that Pelevin himself creates the image of a
vision of a world held together only by its inhabitants' need to
feed on
the Other, this approach seems
justified. Drawing as well on Frank Lestringant's
The remainder of the paper, by contrast, deals with the central
protagonist's successful attempt to create a sense of self which is
ultimately beyond the text and therefore non-cannibalistic. Thus he
begins the novel as an esthete inclined to romanticize the danse
macabre of his fellow insects as they circle around a neon lamp, but
at the same time clearly skeptical of the worth of the locus
classicus. The thrust of Pelevin's novel thus clearly aims at creating
an absolute identity beyond the proliferation of scripted selves
afloat in Russia today. This paper will examine the ways in which
Pelevin both deplores the virtual self created by
communism/capitalism, while positing a genuine
identity
beyond the dichotomy of first and third world.