A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia and Other Stories - Softcover

Pelevin, Victor; Bromfield, Andrew

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0811215431 ISBN 13: 9780811215435

Publisher: New Directions, 2003

Synopsis

Stories by the renowned Russian wizard. Victor Pelevin is "the only young Russian novelist to have made an impression in the West" (Village Voice). A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia, the second of Pelevin's Russian Booker Prize-winning short story collections, continues his Sputnik-like rise. The writers to whom he is frequently comparedKafka, Bulgakov, Philip K. Dick, and Joseph Hellerare all deft fabulists, who find fuel for their fires in society's deadening protocol. "At the very start of the third semester, in one of the lectures on Marxism-Leninism, Nikita Dozakin made a remarkable discovery," begins the story "Sleep." Nikita's discovery is that everyone around him, from parents to television talk-show hosts, is actually asleep. In "Vera Pavlova's Ninth Dream," the attendant in a public toilet finds that her researches into solipsism have dire and diabolical consequences. In the title story, a young Muscovite, Sasha, stumbles upon a group of people in the forest who can transform themselves into wolves. As Publishers Weekly noted, "Pelevin's allegories are reminiscent of children's fairy tales in their fantastic depictions of worlds within worlds, solitary souls tossed helplessly among them." Pelevinwhom 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 land of great sublimity and black comic brilliance.

About this title

About the Author

Born in 1962 in Moscow, Victor Pelevin is the great chronicler of Perestroika-era decay.

Reviews

Originally published in 1994, Pelevin's second Booker Prize-winning short fiction collection brilliantly and poignantly satirizes the economic, cultural and spiritual decay of Mother Russia under Communism. Kafka, one of Pelevin's more obvious literary ancestors, described his own enigmatic black fantasies as "parables," and so are Pelevin's: almost fable-simple on the surface with strange subterranean currents contorting their helpless protagonists into caricatures and corpses. These eight parables each close on a lesson illustrating the absurdity of life in the U.S.S.R. "Sleep" opens at a Marxist-Leninist university lecture, where Nikita Dozakin discovers that everyone, including his droning professor, has learned to avoid all unpleasantness-daily living-by functioning in their sleep. In "Tai Shou Chuan," Comrade Chan, whisked mysteriously to Moscow, rises to rule the entire country, but is dumped for telling the truth; power, in the eyes of the wise, he learns, is no different from an anthill. "The Ontology of Childhood," like the title story and "Vera Pavlovna's Ninth Dream," reveals the bitter pain of every stage of life under the Soviets: adults make children "feel rotten because they want you to become just like them"-depressed, drunken, angry, isolated, less than human. The few feeble flashes of compassion and joy in Pelevin's bleak landscape are achieved only by sleep, alcohol, drugs or changing into something other than a citizen of a land where "you were born and grew up in a prison," subject to inhuman laws a Big Brother made and enforces, which you blindly endure with "the calm enduring hatred known only to Siamese cats with cruel masters, and Soviet engineers who read George Orwell."
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: New Directions
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0811215431
• ISBN 13: 9780811215435
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224