Viktor Pelevin's prolific oeuvre has received substantial critical attention in recent years. One of Russia's bestselling intellectual authors, Pelevin tirelessly examines the mechanisms of the global consumer society that entrap every human being. While this central theme of his work has certainly been addressed over the years, it is not until now that a comprehensive, theoretically sophisticated, and multifaceted study of it has been attempted. Sofya Khagi's beautifully written book is an important and long overdue consideration of Pelevin's fiction as a critique of the global postmodern condition as well as of its specifically post-Soviet iteration. In her study, Khagi, as the title suggests, focuses on Pelevin's take on our unfreedom. She looks beyond Pelevin's playfulness and those purely entertaining aspects of the writer's work that have made his texts wildly popular in order to consider what he has to teach his readers “about society, bondage, and possible avenues of liberation” (4). Khagi expertly deploys multiple theoretical frameworks of which, she demonstrates, Pelevin is quite aware and which range from the Frankfurt School's probing into techno-consumerism to Michel Foucault's, Jean Baudrillard's, Frederic Jameson's, and Slavoj Žižek's investigations of various aspects of our postmodern society. These latter include media simulation, biopolitics, posthumanism, and the “end of history” debates.
Khagi's approach in this book is mostly thematic as she starts with a close reading of Pelevin's key turn-of-the-century novel Generation П, which heralds many central ideas of his numerous subsequent works and which, while firmly rooted in the western tradition of dystopian literature, refuses to offer any kind of salvation. The same novel is used in another chapter to demonstrate the mechanisms of Pelevin's trademark multilingual wordplay and its function in his overall critique of the globalized consumer society as it gets established in the post-Soviet space. Subsequent chapters tackle a range of Pelevin's focal points, including his “biotic schemes” that inscribe humans into the overall biomass existing for the sheer purpose of consumption, and another mechanism of dehumanization that operates through mechanization and digitization, turning humans into machines. Probing discussions of other aspects of Pelevin's novels in later chapters explore his eschatology, his take on Russian history, as well as his social critique vis-à-vis his literary predecessors in both classical Russian and Soviet literature. While the Dostoevskian references are very prominent in his works, allusions to Soviet science fiction are rather less so, and the author's discussion of his dialogue with, and subversion of, the Strugatsky brothers’ Enlightenment-affirming visions is very poignant. Pelevin's art of irony is the subject of another chapter, and here Khagi reaches perhaps her most valuable conclusion: it is from the position of a total ironist that he is able “to smuggle across the much-trivialized values of goodness, truth, and beauty” (201). Thus, we are to look for ethical authenticity in the ironies Pelevin deploys every step of the way.
Khagi concludes her monograph with an overview of Pelevin's trajectory across the post-Soviet decades and a consideration of his place in the overall literary landscape of post-Soviet Russia. Over the years, Pelevin has been accused of being slave to the market, forced to churn out novel after novel, becoming, in a sense, a one-trick pony, with repetitive plots and devices shaping books that are, at best, mediocre. Khagi readily agrees that some of the later novels indeed leave much to be desired and fail to contribute much to what was said elsewhere. This, however, she argues, is no reason to dismiss him as some Russian critics have done. Pelevin is as much caught up in the machine of global production and consumption as the next person; nonetheless, he wins by being supremely auto-reflexive and self-aware. This reviewer's only regret is that Khagi does not investigate Pelevin's Buddhism as comprehensively as she does his engagement with postmodern theory. She does of course include those explicit references to Buddhist notions that are at the core of some of his key novels, especially Chapaev and the Void, but a more focused analysis of the Buddhist core of his writings is perhaps what is missing from this otherwise engaging, erudite, and enlightening monograph that is now staple reading for all current and future Pelevin scholars.
