Victor Pelevin

After auditioning for the part as a singing geisha at a dubious bar, Lena and eleven other “lucky” girls are sent to work at a posh underground nightclub reserved exclusively for Russia’s upper-crust elite. They are to be a sideshow attraction to the rest of the club’s entertainment, and are billed as the “famous singing caryatids.” Things only get weirder from there. Secret ointments, praying mantises, sexual escapades, and grotesque murder are quickly ushered into the plot. The Russian literary master Victor Pelevin holds nothing back, and The Hall of the Singing Caryatids, his most recent story to be translated into English, is sure to make you squirm in your seat with utter delight.

Victor Pelevin is “the only young Russian novelist to have made an impression in the West” (Village Voice). With A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia, the second of Pelevin’s Russian Booker Prize-winning short story collections, he continues his Sputnik-like rise. Like the writers to whom he is frequently compared––Kafka, Bulgakov, Philip K. Dick, and Joseph Heller––he is a deft fabulist, who finds fuel for his fire in society’s deadening protocol. In “The Tarzan Swing,” a street wanderer converses with a stranger who could be his own reflection; in the title story, a young Muscovite, Sasha, stumbles upon a group of people in the forest who can transform themselves into wolves; in “Vera Pavlova’s Ninth Dream,” the attendant in a public toilet finds her researches into solipsism have dire and diabolical consequences. As Publishers Weekly noted about this collection, “Pelevin’s allegories are reminiscent of children’s fairy tales in their fantastic depictions of worlds within worlds, solitary souls tossed helplessly among them.” Pelevin––whom Spin called “a master absurdist, a brilliant satirist of things Soviet, but also of things human”––carries us in A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia to a sublime land of black comic brilliance.

With a phantasmagorical, surreal style as brilliantly absurd as Gogol’s, Victor Pelevin writes of the wild chaos of the New Russia. In one story, a public toilet attendant discovers in her tiled hovel the entranceway to an alternate reality; in another, a storage hut dreams of becoming a bicycle. “Hermit and Six-Toes,” “Vera Pavlovna’s Ninth Dream,” “The Life and Adventures of Shed Number XII,” and “Tai Shou Chuan USSR (A Chinese Folk Tale)” are the four stories by young Russian writer, Victor Pelevin, collected in this New Directions Bibelot edition.

In a recent New York Times Magazine feature article, Victor Pelevin was cited as “almost alone among his generation of Russian novelists in speaking with a voice authentically his own, and in trying to write about Russian life in its current idiom.” Since the publication of this collection of stories, The Blue Lantern, Pelevin’s books have been translated into many languages, and Pelevin himself has been touted as a major world writer. The Blue Lantern, winner of the Russian Little Booker Prize, gathers eight of his very best stories. Various, delightful, and uncategorizable, the stories are highly addictive. Pelevin here, as in The Yellow Arrow (New Directions, 1996), Omon Ra (ND, 1997), and A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia (ND, 1998), pays great attention to the meaning of life, in earnest and as spoof. In the title story, kids in a Pioneer camp tell terrifying bedtime stories; in “Hermit and Six-Toes,” two chickens are obsessed with the nature of the universe as viewed from their poultry plant; the Young Communist League activists of “Mid-Game” change their sex to become hard-currency prostitutes; and “The Life and Adventures of Shed #XII” is the story of a storage hut whose dream is to become a bicycle.

Victor Pelevin’s novel Omon Ra has been widely praised for its poetry and its wickedness, a novel in line with the great works of Gogol and Bulgakov: “full of the ridiculous and the sublime,” says The Observer (London). Omon is chosen to be trained in the Soviet space program, the fulfillment of his lifelong dream. However, he enrolls only to encounter the terrifying absurdity of Soviet protocol and its backward technology: a bicycle-powered moonwalker; the outrageous Colonel Urgachin (“a kind of Soviet Dr. Strangelove” — New York Times); and a one-way assignment to the moon. The New Yorker proclaimed: “Omon’s adventure is like a rocket firing off its various stages — each incident is more jolting and propulsively absurd than the one before.”

A Russian train which makes no stops, the Yellow Arrow has no end and no beginning, and its destination is a ruined bridge. Andrei, less and less lulled by the never-ending hum of the wheels, begins to look for a way to escape. But life in the carriages goes on as always. “Indifferent to their fate, the passengers carry on as usual––trading in nickel melted down from the carriage doors, attending the Upper Bunk avant-garde theatre, leafing through Pasternak’s Early Trains, or disposing of their dead through the compartment windows” (The London Observer).