Victor Pelevin
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Victor Olegovich Pelevin (Russian: Виктор Олегович Пелевин, b. November 22, 1962) is a Russian writer, one of the most acclaimed and successful to emerge in the post-Soviet period. His books usually carry the outward conventions of the science fiction genre, however those are used to construct involved, multi-layered postmodernist texts, fusing together elements of pop culture and esoteric philosophies.
After high school Pelevin received a degree in electromechanical engineering from the Moscow Power Engineering Institute, then attended seminars in creative writing at the Literature Institute. As an editor of "Science and Religion" magazine, he was responsible for an ongoing series of articles on Eastern mysticism.
Pelevin's first story was published in 1989, and for the next 3 years his short stories appeared in various magazines and compilations, making him a prominent figure among the SF "in" crowd and garnering several awards. In 1992 a book of Pelevin's collected stories The Blue Lantern received the first annual Russian Little Booker Prize, and next year his first novel.
Pelevin cultivates a public persona that shuns the public eye. He rarely gives interviews; during those interviews, he is known to talk about the nature of mind rather than his own writing. He did, however, permit all of his texts in Russian predating the year 2000 to be published on the Internet for non-commercial use [1]. Some novels are available as voice files (in Russian).
Pelevin's prose is usually devoid of dialog between the author and the reader, whether through plot, character development, literary form or narrative language, which corresponds to his philosophy (both stated and unstated) that, for the most part, it is the reader who infuses the text with meaning. To make this point, one of his novels bears this inscription on the cover: "Any thought that occurs in the process of reading this book is subject to copyright. Unauthorized thinking of it is prohibited".
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Selected bibliography
Short novels
- Hermit and Sixfinger / Затворник и Шестипалый (1990)
- Omon Ra / Омон Ра (contamination OMON+Amun-Ra) (1991)
- Prince of Central Planning / Принц Госплана (1992)
- The Yellow Arrow / Желтая стрела (1993)
Novels
- The Life of Insects / Жизнь насекомых (1993)
- Buddha's Little Finger (aka Clay Machine-Gun) / Чапаев и Пустота (Chapayev and Void) (1996)
- Babylon (aka Generation Π, Homo Zapiens) / Поколение "П" (1999)
- Numbers (as part of the book DTP(NN) - The Dialectics of the Transition Period (from Nowhere to No Place)) / Числа (часть книги ДПП(NN) - Диалектика Переходного Периода (из Ниоткуда в Никуда)) (2004)
- The Sacred Book of the Shapeshifter / Священная Книга Оборотня (2005)
- The Helmet of Horror / Шлем ужаса (2005)
- Empire V / Ампир В (2006)
Essays, short stories
- The Werewolf Problem in Central Russia / Проблема верволка в средней полосе
- Bulldozer Driver’s Day / День бульдозериста
- Zombification / Зомбификация
- Blue Lantern and Other Stories
