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: 23 2010, 00:33:56
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Q: Although you began your writing career in the 1980salready in the era of
glasnostyoure a product of the Brezhnev era, and many of your stories evoke
the dull, melancholy atmosphere of that time. How do you feel it touched you
personally?
A: I dont know. I was an ordinary boy, an only child; I grew up in Moscow with my
parents; my father was a military officer and my mother an economist. I wouldnt say
my writing had any particular connection with my experience as a child. Though I
liked riding my bike, and that comes into Omon Ra. The hero is riding his bike along
the highway, and suddenly he finds himself pressing the pedals of this imaginary
moon-walker. Thats how I felt. I was always riding and riding to reach fresh air.
I was touched by this monster of socialism like everyone else. When I was 16
I entered an institute of power engineeringif you went to an institute you could
get out of army service, which was like doing two years in gaol, so I went to the
institute and I came into contact with the Komsomol [the Young Communist
League] there. In those days there were only two roles to choose fromeither you
joined the Komsomol or you were an Enemy of the People and you got expelled.
So everyone joined. Everyone faked it, faked their allegiance, faked what they
said. If you asked an improper question that was it, you were out. So Ive tasted all
that. I got very good marks, at least in the first year. After that I stopped going to
lectures and borrowed notes from the girls or just trusted my luck, and I did all
right. But you could feel this pressure almost physically.
Q: Do you mean you lived in fear of the authorities?
A: No, it was a matter of disgust rather than fear. You felt disgusted with everything.
But the difference in those days was that you could put up a kind of barrier to pro-
tect yourself. All of us knew that the state was evil. Evil was concentrated on the
other side of the barrier. Now evil is diffused everywhere; its no longer possible to
locate the source of it. Or to say who the goodies and the baddies are. So life was
simpler in those days. It was simpler partly just because I was younger, but also
becausewell, for one thing it was easier to be an expert in those days. Standards
werent high. But also because the state participated in every aspect of your life, it
controlled what you did, it told you what to do. And that made things easier in
some ways. Its hard to be totally responsible for your own life. You feel uneasy
looking out of the window if you dont have a regular job and a ready-made
programme.
Q: So do you feel a certain nostalgia for that time?
A: No. I didnt like living under communism. Of course its better to live under Ade-
nauer than under Hitler. Maybe there are a few babushki around who feel nostal-
gia for the old days, but its simply nostalgia for their youth.
Q: After you graduated from the technical institute you joined the Literary Insti-
tute. Did you gain anything as a writer from your studies there?
A: No. The dream of every student at the Institute was just to make connections.
Now I dont need those connections, and its odd to think back to it. But that was
the point. While I was there I started working as a journalist and I set up the Myth
publishing house with some friends; we published a few books, including an
anthology of contemporary literature, but I packed it in last year.
These days you have to take every chance you can to earn hard currency. So I
work for foreign magazines and interpret for foreign correspondents and some-
times do broadcasts on Radio Liberty. And Ive translated some occult books into
Russian.
Q: Youre obviously keen on the occult and mysticism.
A: Yes, I read a lot. Im not a practitioner! A sorcerer tries to influence others. Im
trying to influence myself ...
Anyway the point is that you cant make money as a writer here these days, no
matter how famous you are, and even if your books are published in thousands of
copies. I sold 100,000 copies of my book of stories, The Blue Lantern. If you pub-
lished that number in the West youd be regarded as a great success, but theres
no money to be had in it here. The only hope is to get your work translated so you
earn some hard currency. You dont need that much, although Moscow is very
expensive now. People are charging as much for apartments here as they do in
Manhattan.
Theres a kind of hard currency élite in Russia now, with everyone else just
trying to hang on and survive. Its made a big difference to the mood of younger
people. Kids now are much more materialistic than they used to be; their only
goal is to make money. It was different for us; we grew up in another country. I feel
now that Im slowly emigrating along with all my compatriots, slowly leaving the
past behind. We even have a new language, a new slangpeople for instance use
the word bucksy for dollars.
But its not as if we now live in the West. Everything is much harsher and cruel-
ler here. Just to compete in business you have to have criminal connections
the whole society is more criminalized. The point is that this was never a real
socialist society, in the way that Sweden, for example, is. Theres no culture of
kindness in Russia. People here are much crueller than they are, say, in America.
America went through this pioneer stuff two centuries ago.
Q: Your work appears to have little in common with that of the unofficial writers of
a slightly older generation. Did you come into contact with any of the former
underground? Did you know their work?
A: No, Ive never mixed in any of those literary circles. There was never any ques-
tion of my joining the underground because it was already perestroika by the
time I started publishing at the end of the eighties and I never had any problem
getting my work into print. But in general I dont have many literary connections.
I dont understand these people, or maybe I understand them too well. Theyre
full of intrigues and struggles. Whereas I think literature should be a refuge, a
shelter. Maybe its bad for ones career to look at it that way, but thats how I feel.
I cant say Ive read much recent Russian literature. I certainly cant name any
particular influences. I liked Bitovs Pushkin House when I read it at the time
this romance with nineteenth-century Russian literature that Bitov hadbut I
doubt whether Id want to read it now. I like Iskander, his early work that he pub-
lished in the Soviet era, because it has some real warmth. And of course writers
from earlier in the centuryBulgakov, for instance; I was deeply touched by
The Master and Margarita.
But Im not interested in most of the younger writers. We share the same world,
but we see it differently. I dont like postmodernism; its like eating the flesh of a
dead culture. People like Sorokin I dont care for. Basically he has only one trick
after youve read one story you dont have to read any of the others. Its destruc-
tive writing. Somebody had to destroy socialist realism, but now its dead and you
cant keep feeding off it. And in a sense the real socialist realism is more interest-
ing than the parodies of it. Its so weird to read that stuff now.
Who else? I like what Ive read of Zufar Gareyev. Hes got some peace in him,
some calm, and I realize I felt happy reading him. A writer should be a kind of
transmitter who connects this time with eternity. Thats something Gareyev
does.
But I think Ive been more influenced by foreign writers. Aldous Huxley, for
instanceI like his essays a lot; and Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf especially, and
Carlos Castaneda ... and various more obscure people, occult writers.
Q: Your writing is certainly more accessible than that of the former alternative or
underground writers. Youre a natural story-teller, for one thing. Did you set out
to write in a more popular vein?
A: No, of course not, but it pleases me that Im popular and that ordinary people
like to read me. You see, its quite hard to compete with the mainstream, with
famous names like Vladimir Makanin who get published in the big Moscow
journals and receive prizes and all that sort of thing. Not that I see myself as com-
peting, but its hard to get into Novy mir or Znamya. So Im pleased about that,
but, you know, its even harder to compete with the pulp fiction thats printed in
hundreds of thousands of copies these days. So Im even more pleased that Im
able to compete with those trashy writers.
But I dont deal with the reader when I write, I mean while Im in the process I
really dont care whether anyones going to read me, I block it out, its a personal
thing. In fact I hate absolutely everything about writing except for the few
moments when you experience something thats very hard to explain, something
thats much better than any drug. I dont think you can get that if you set out to be
a best-selling writer and write one book after another, trying to take into account
the publics taste.
To me its quite surprising that they read my books here at all. Its not that I
underestimate myself, but its as if you live in a cave and you have this very pecu-
liar religion which no one in the world shares, and you are the high priest of this
religion ...
Q: So you write the rules?
A: Well not just that, but you perform the service, you invent the ritual. Thats what
writings like. It has nothing to do with what critics write about. Critics have been
quite kind to me, but that doesnt alter the fact that most of them are incredibly
stupid, mean, venomous.
What I like about writing is that its private, and you dont need anything to do
it. Its not like shooting a film when you need a crew, lights, cameras, loads of
money. As soon as you need money and people youre not free, whereas here, in
literature, youre absolutely free. Yourenot exactly God, but you can create
something out of nothing, you can create a whole other reality and transform it
into anything you want. There are some rules which govern this world, of course,
but if you know them its really very nice ... Its a kind of trick, I think anyone could
do it if they really wanted.
So I like this process of inventing, but I have to admit that Im not really inter-
ested in literature as such. When I read other peoples fiction I often cant help
thinking someones made this up, and then I start wondering why I should read
it. I see the trick, I see how its done and I cant get absorbed in it. You cant really
respect something invented by another human being.
I think in general theres been a trend away from pure fiction; non-fiction
is becoming much more popular. What I mostly see in fiction these days is
irridescent mediocrity, to use Cyril Connollys beautiful expression. Whereas
non-fiction, even if its not very distinguished, at least contains some information
about the world, theres something true behind it. And just the knowledge that
its based on truth transforms every sentence, makes every thought seem more
valuable.
So the trick is to make an unreal story real, to make fiction seem like non-
fiction, and if I manage to do that one sunny day, Ill be a happy man. Real litera-
ture has this quality of being true without really being true. It has to have a
certain pressure behind it to achieve that, and its a miracle when it happens.
Everything in life makes sense when you feel the presence of this miracle.
So for me writing is like arbitrarily digging a hole in the ground, not knowing
whether Ill find this treasure or not, not knowing whether this miracle will take
place or not.
Q: Does the pressure you speak of mean telling the truth, in some way, about
yourself ?
A: Maybe. You know, a writer from Armenia once said to me that there are basically
two kinds of writers: those who write about themselves and those who write
about other people. I belong to those who write about themselves. I know that Im
using the contents of my own psyche, and that if you do that you have to be
honest. That was what was wrong with the entire literature of socialist realism
just that it wasnt honest.
I dont have characters as such in my work. I know that I can write only about
different aspects of myself. Every person contains a universe. Thats not a
metaphor, it really is like thatand at the same time hes contained within this
universe too. Im quite sure I could tell everything about you, just writing about
myself, and you could tell everything about me just by looking at some aspect of
yourself. What makes people different is the exact point at which they look, and if
you are able to shift your gaze it means that you can create other characters and
make them real.
But thats not the point for me. There are certain rules to writing, and the main
rule is that what you write must be interesting to read.
Q: But youve just said that you dont take readers into account when youre writing.
A: Whether your work is interesting or not isnt something that you can arrange.
Its just a quality of the writing itself. It does have to do with honesty. If you write
honestly, if you write in a way that genuinely interests and corresponds to some
part of yourself, its bound to be interesting to someone else. But making it inter-
esting shouldnt be your objective.
Q: You started your career writing short stories and have since turned to novellas or
short novels. Do you have a preferred genre? Do you know in advance the scale of
a work?
A: A writer has a certain natural distance. I like to write short stories, twenty-five
pages, thirty maximum. A novel for me is a kind of necklace which consists of dif-
ferent stories threaded together. I just get bored, you knowI cant imagine how
people write novels of 800 pages describing the life of a single person. What inter-
ests me in literature is some specific energy, and a single story can contain the
same amount as a novel.
Q: Youve talked about the trick of making non-real things seem real. But you set
yourself a particularly hard task in that respect by starting out with manifestly
unreal situationspeople and things in your stories undergo supernatural
transformations or live in worlds seemingly governed by laws different from ours.
A: But the point is, it doesnt matter what subject you take. There is this thing that
just makes literature literature and if you can get to it nothing else matters. Your
characters can be insects or wolves or whatever. I have this novel about people
who turn into insects, and if I described it to you just like that youd think it a
pretty stupid ideawhat are these creatures supposed to be? And how did these
transformations take place? Thats what Id ask myself. But the point is to write it
in such a way that you dont feel the need to ask these questions, you feel the pres-
sure of the story, it touches you somehow.
By the way, I was just thinking about thisits an interesting question, whether
the result of a writers work is material or not? You see the nice thing about art is that
the real product isnt material: what you really produce when you write are feelings,
human feelings, the things your readers experience when they read your work.
Q: What was the starting-point for The Life of Insects?
A: I like insects, and I wrote it because a friend of mine presented me with a small
book, a beautiful, glossy book on American insects with very nice illustrations in
bright colours. So I read it carefully and I didnt really need any more, because this
book, showing you these nice insects and giving you some interesting details
about them, served as a kind of notebook for me. So in a sense I felt I didnt have
to write the book, or only had to write a small part of itthe basic chapters were
already there. Although there were certain things I excludedfor instance a
chapter about this plant which eats flies. I thought that might become a bit
gloomy and morbid. Anyway I dont know how it all works in a literary sense,
maybe its not that good, but in my world its still a source of warmth to me; I feel
that the novel emanates warmth.
In fact I like it much more than anything else Ive written, not because I dont
see its shortcomings, but because its something very personal; its connected in
my mind with the place I describe in the novel and the summer I spent there. Its
a place in the Crimea called Karadag, a little village with a sanatorium, next to
a volcano. Its near the resort of Koktebel, but much quieterKoktebels just a
little Moscow, theres no point going there if you want to get away.
I wrote The Life of Insects just after Id spent the summer there, in recollection
of the summer, so it has this private association for meits like when you catch
some fragrance and suddenly remember the situation where you smelled it the
last time, and all sorts of things come back to you that you thought youd forgotten.
For me the novel contains a kind of canned summer, like a scent in a bottle.
Maybe this feeling also has to do with what was happening at the time. It was
the summer of 1991 that I was there, the summer of the coup, and I wrote the
novel the following winter. You see, politics affects you even if you dont want it
to. You can be totally withdrawn from politics and social life, but every time they
start a coup or bombard the parliament or elect Zhirinovsky,* something
* Pelevin is referring here to the coup against Gorbachev in August 1991; the crushing of a revolt by anti-reformist Members of Parliament after Yeltsins suspension of the Russian Parliament in September 1993, and the unexpectedly large vote for the nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky in December 1993 (see also note on p. 177).
changes. You can sit locked in your apartment with the TV switched off, but
somehow you still feel it. Its as if the chemical content of the air has changed.
Q: All the stories of different insects in the novelthe scarab beetle pushing this
huge dungball before him, the ants digging their burrows, the moths always
flying towards the lightcould be read as different metaphors for our human
condition. Are you offering us a choice of metaphors for how to see ourselves? Or
is there one which strikes you as more pertinent to our lives than the others?
A: When I write something I know how it should be written but I cant explain it. I
think if a writer gave you a choice of metaphors youd throw up after ten pages, so
I hope that isnt what I make you do.
Q: But do you think were more beetle-like or ant-like or mosquito-like, or are
we all of these things?
A: Oh, that depends ... some people are mosquitoes, some people are ants. In this
country we mostly have ants, I think, because the whole society was designed as
a giant antheap. In America you have mosquitoes trying to suck blood from each
other.
Q: There seem to be plenty of those in Russia at the moment ...
A: Exactly, exactly, thats exactly whats taking place. The ants are turning into
mosquitoes. In fact youre right, theres probably more blood sucked here than
anywhere else.
Q: To me the most powerful image in the novel was the image of the beetles,
engaged in this endless labour of pushing their dungballs before them and block-
ing their own view with this accumulation of their selves, their lives.
A: A friend of mine paid me a nice compliment when he said that hed drunk for
three days after reading that piece about the beetles. Its maybe the part of the
novel that means the most to me too.
Q: It was in this story of the beetles that I especially felt your achievement in
making these creatures human, touching us with their emotions, and showing
the world from their perspective. Suddenly with the beetles we find ourselves in a
kind of fog, unable to see beyond this monstrous ball of dung, our view of the
world fantastically reduced.
A: You mean that for most people the view is wider?
Q: Well, in the novel it seems to me that you play constantly on these changes of
perspectiveand its only by contrast with some wider view that you get this ter-
rible sense of reduction in the beetles case. The focus is constantly changing, so
at certain moments were able to survey the landscape with a human eye, to see
the sanatorium, the summer day, the lunch table outside, and the bottle of
wineand at the next were simply in a fog, we have only the dungball in front of
us, or we are the dungball.
A: Yes exactly ... but it isnt that the world is suddenly reduced to a dungball, its
more thatyou realize that the world, your world, is a dung world, and the rest of
the world which youre unacquainted with is suddenly left behind. Thats what I
meantif I meant anything.
Q: The overwhelming feeling in that part of the story is one of lonelinessthe lone-
liness of the young beetle abandoned to his fate, forced to grow up and start push-
ing his burden alone.
A: I think that loneliness is the natural condition of every human being. There are
people who understand that they are lonely, there are people who dontthats the
only difference. I think that I understand that I am lonely. And that I always will be.
Q: Much of your work turns on the sorts of shifts in perception weve been talking
ofas if different versions of reality could simply be switched on and off, if we
could only find the key.
A: The point is not whether they can be switched on and offthe question is who
does the switching and whats being switched. In the story of the fireflies the
herowell, lets call him the herofinds that its very easy to switch on his own
personality, or his absence of personality. These shifts in perception can be
achieved in all sorts of wayswith the help of exercises, the sort of exercises that
Buddhists practise, or with drugs. But the point is to understand whose percep-
tion youre shifting ... thats the difficult question.
Q: Weve been talking of these ideas in the abstract. But whats so striking about
your writing is the poetic concreteness you give to these ideas. I was thinking for
instance of the scene of the dance floor in The Life of Insectshow vividly you
convey that sense of summer night in the park, the music, the flickering dancers.
Its scenes like this that convince us of the reality of the story, give us the sense of
felt experience.
A: Well, I dont know where that comes from. Ive never danced in my life. But I
admit I like looking at dancing people, especially when the lights get switched on
and off. You catch them in glimpses, like a sequence of photographs.
Q: In your novella The Yellow Arrowthe reader is plunged so immediately and nat-
urally into the humdrum life of the train where the story takes place that it takes a
while to realize where you are. Your experience as a reader duplicates that of the
passengers on the train. At the beginning, in the first few pages, I was mystified.
Was this fellow we were reading about living in some kind of dormitory? And
where was this café? Were we inside or outside?
A: That was the idea. The reader is meant to understand where the action takes
place only when the hero understands it. Because the hero himself also doesnt
know at first that hes on this train. He gets up and starts his day and goes to a café
and chats and the whole thing could be happening anywhere in this countrya
dormitory, wherever. Normal life.
So it wasnt because of my ineptness that you were lost at the beginning. The
passengers are lost as well. But I like this feeling thatagain, one can suddenly
change the whole perspective, make the reader see things differently.
Q: Make the reader see that he too is a passenger on a train thats bound for a ruined
bridge?
A: It sounds very banal when you say it. The point of the story is that the only ones
who go on heading towards this bridge are those who think its inevitable.
But Im rather dubious about this story, I dont know if it works.
Q: Why?
A: Well, I dont know, Im dubious about everything I write. But this oneits too
simple, maybe. The metaphor is very simple: life is a train. Life is a journey. When
you use a simple metaphor like that you take a very big gamble. If it works then itll
be much stronger for being simple, but if it doesnt itll just be banal.
Q:The reason it works for me is that the metaphor is taken so literallyits fur-
nished in such witty detail, with a kind of absurd realism. It poses a metaphysical
riddle with a wonderfully matter-of-fact air ; theres nothing unusual, on the sur-
face, about the passengers experience.
A: But there isnt anything unusual about it. I think that all human beings have the
same kind of experience; the particular details dont matter. What matters is what
you do with this experience, how you deal with it, how you understand it. All of us
are passengers on this train, but the pointI say it in the storyis to ride on the
train without being its passenger. Theres nothing much more to be said.
Q: It also works because youre a good story-teller. Forget metaphorsas a reader
youre engaged, you get absorbed in the story, you want to know how its going to
end.
A: Well thats nice if its true. Funnily enough there have been a lot of articles about
this Yellow Arrow, even though its only sixty or seventy pages long. It seems to
have struck peoples imaginations. But one critic, in the newspaper Segodnya
[Today], was rather worried about the endinghe said it only ended like that,
with our hero escaping from the train, because I had to end it somehow.
Q: The end is puzzling. If the train encompasses the whole of life, what lies outside
it? Who are the inhabitants of the city that the hero sees just before he finally
jumps off?
A: Well its another metaphor, I supposeas if hed jumped into another
metaphor. The ending doesnt mean that the hero departs this life, that he dies or
whatever. Theres another clue, if you notice, in the story, which suggests that the
train isnt so much life itself as a sequence of thoughts, with one thought that calls
itself I and which serves as a locomotive for the rest. So it doesnt have anything
to do with the so-called real worldeverything takes place within, as everything
in your world takes place inside you.
Q: So the train is a metaphor for a single persons world, or mind?
A: Again when you pronounce it like that it sounds banal. But the thing is, do we
have any proof that the world exists? Everything we deal with is perception. It
makes no sense to discuss it because its just a matter of choice, you can choose to
act as if something were true or you can choose otherwise ...
Q: It seemed to me that the storylike all your workfunctions on two levels, both
as existential conundrum and as local satire. The train is a very Russian train, or
lets say a post-Soviet train: the various social groupsthe literary types who dis-
cuss postmodernism and quote poetry, and the mafiosi types who are busy trad-
ing and doing dealstheyre comically recognizable from this society. I even felt
that there was something classically Russian in the cosy taken-for-grantedness of
the whole situation, the sense that most of these peopleapart from the few ini-
tiatedshow such remarkable lack of curiosity; they accept without question the
rather evident restrictions on their lives. But perhaps youd say that thats true of
all of us?
A: Well, of course, societies differ in certain ways, but they have a great many more
things in common than we realizemore than the things that differentiate them.
I wouldnt say there was anything peculiarly Russian about this train. You can
move coaches on it and go abroad.
Q:So you wouldnt say there was any element of satire in the story?
A: I didnt plan to write anything satirical. I dont think the storys a satire; it
describes whats actually taking place. All the reference to business deals and
making business connections and so onIm not satirizing these things, Im
relating what I see.
Q: At the end of your novel Omon Ra the herohaving apparently taken a trip all
the way to the moonfinds himself back on the familiar network of the Moscow
metro. Its a relief to find him safe and sound, but of course the underground
metro is an image of entrapmentwe see that the hero hasnt escaped at all, hes
back in the dreary familiar world. Is that your own recurring nightmare?
A: I dont have nightmares but I have convoluted dreams. Today I found myself in
some sort of Zoroastrian sanctuary in a park in Moscow, and there was no way to
get out of this park, nobody knew where the exit was ...
But I dont think this is a personal thing. Were all trapped; the difference again
is just that some people understand this and some dont. Ive had this feeling ever
since I was 14, the feeling that you dont have any real control over your life. You
cant change ityou are ruled by outside influences. Of course you can make
promises to yourself, promises to change. But its stupid work, just a way of
monitoring what actually takes place outside your control.
Perhaps there is a way out of this trap. I know a lot of people who are interested
in Buddhism but I dont think they have the answer. Nor do Christians. To be a
Christian is to live according to what Christ said, and in principle it may be a good
thing, a very hard thing, but I cant accept its routinesturning up to church
every Sunday and so forth. Thats not a way out.
But still we have to ponder these things. Everyone has a tuning fork inside him-
self which he should use. Thats what a writer should be doing. The word spiritu-
ality has been terribly debased in our societypeople, including writers, go on
and on about it when all theyre really interested in is making money. But still, I
dont like fiction that has no spiritual value in it at all. I cant see the point of writ-
ing or reading something that has no spiritual meaning.
Omon Ra is about the fate of a man who decided in his soul to go up there, to go
to the moon. Then he found out that what he had undergone was not a real jour-
ney butsomething like a transformation of the soul.
Q: It seems to me as you talk about your work that you disown your own wit. Omon
Ra certainly gives lots of room for spiritual reflection, but its also, in a melan-
choly way, very funnyfunny about Brezhnevs Russia and all its cardboard and
tin-foil emblems.
A: Well yes, the critics wrote that it was a libellous description of Soviet space tech-
nology, and of course its libellous. I never did a moments real research on it. Too
much knowledge is very oppressive when youre writing. The best thing is to
know just a little bit, and it wasnt hard to find that muchthe odd detail to give
the story a sort of authenticity.
I spent my childhood in Brezhnevs Russia, and of course thats partly what the
storys about. It has that atmosphere. But what interested me was the ontology of
childhood as such. Im no longer the person I used to be, and some day Ill cease
to be the person I am now. But in principle I dont accept the very idea of being
grown up. In The Life of Insects you see that at the beginning the scarab beetle
doesnt have this dungball to push before him. But after a while it begins to
formthis individual life, this personalityand in due course it turns out that
this is the only thing youre doing, pushing this great ball before you. I wanted to
try to capture that processand recall what it was like before it began.
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