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Companion to Victor Pelevin, a collaborative undertaking by a group of emerging Russianist scholars, focuses on the work of one of the most important and hotly debated post-Soviet writers. The contributors offer new readings of Pelevin texts that cover a broad time span and pay due attention to the philosophical and aesthetic complexities of Pelevin's oeuvre in its development from the early post-Soviet years to the second decade of the present millennium.
List of contents
Introduction
Victor Pelevin: Life, Works, Critical Debates
Sofya Khagi, University of Michigan
Part One: The Post-Soviet
1. The Early Years: Post-Soviet with a Capital "S"
Michael Martin, University of Michigan
Part Two: Space, Time, History
2. Space-Time Poetics in Chapaev and the Void
Sofya Khagi, University of Michigan
3. Parody of Past and Present in Chapaev and the Void
Christopher Fort, University of Michigan
4. Masking the Void, Voiding the Mask: Viktor Pelevin and the Performance of History
Alexander McConnell, University of Michigan
Part Three: Simulation and Mind Control
5. "The Battle for Your Mind": Transformation of Western Social Theory in Generation '¿'
Dylan Ogden, University of Michigan
6. Totalitarian Literature in Generation '¿'
Meghan Vicks, University of Colorado, Boulder
Part Four: Metamorphosis and Utopia
7. Transformative Reading for Tailless Monkeys: Metamorphoses in The Sacred Book of the Werewolf
Grace Mahoney, University of Michigan
8. The Mythic and the Utopian: Visions of the Future through the Lens of Victor Pelevin's S.N.U.F.F. and Love for Three Zuckerbrins
Theodore Trotman, University of Chicago
Appendix
Select Publications by Victor Pelevin in Russian and English
About the author
Sofya Khagi is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She focuses on contemporary Russian literature, modern Russian poetry, the intersections of literature and philosophy, and Baltic cultures. She is the author of
Silence and the Rest: Verbal Skepticism in Russian Poetry (Northwestern UP, 2013) and
Pelevin and Unfreedom: Poetics, Politics, Metaphysics (Northwestern UP, 2021).
Summary
Companion to Victor Pelevin, a collaborative undertaking by a group of emerging Russianist scholars, focuses on the work of one of the most important and hotly debated post-Soviet writers. It provides a valuable resource to scholars, teachers, and students, including how best to teach Pelevin to university-level students, and which critical debates invite further investigation. The contributors offer new readings of Pelevin texts that cover a broad time span and pay due attention to the philosophical and aesthetic complexities of Pelevin’s oeuvre in its development from the early post-Soviet years to the second decade of the present millennium. Examining all of Pelevin’s major works and all Peleviniana currently available in English, the Companion aims to prompt further inquiry into this author’s intellectually stimulating and socially prescient work.
