After the launch of Victor Pelevin’s hit novel Generation ‘P’, the author set out on a publicity tour in which he behaved poorly, much like his protagonist. And much like his protagonist, he proved that in post-Soviet Russia, bad behavior sells.
Post-Soviet
1999
Viktor Pelevin’s epoch-defining novel Generation ‘P’ appeared in 1999. It portrayed a failed-poet-turned-ad-man, Vavilen Tatarsky who skewers post-Soviet society as he rises through its ranks. The novel became a touchstone for the critique of the bandit capitalism that had come to define 1990s Russia. But the novel not only critiqued the manipulations of market capitalism, it participated in them. Ever the canny entrepreneur, Pelevin leaked chapters from the novel before its release and then performed outrage when the texts spread online. The trick worked and the novel—whose cover was splashed with Coca-Cola, Nike, and Pepsi logos—became a huge bestseller.
In interviews around the novel’s release, Pelevin does not seem to take any authorial distance, and instead performs a version of himself that is at least in part informed by his protagonist Tatarsky—half 90s bandit, half cynical adman. Asked about his favorite western philosophers, he cites Remy Martin and Jack Daniels and goes on to say, “As far as I understand, thoughts are justified in two cases: when they quickly make us rich, and when they charm us with their beauty.” He often shows up late for interviews, discusses drinking or drugs, and talks in the argot of the 1990s criminal underworld. Karina Dobrotvorskaia’s profile of the author in Russian Vogue, begins when Pelevin shows up an hour and a half late and has been drinking. Their conversation starts pleasantly, but when Dobrotvorskaia starts recording, Pelevin “explodes”:
Why you gotta kill my high, huh? [Chto vy mne kaif lomaete, a?] This is the shame and horror of life! I was ready to believe beautiful smart girls could want to sit with me just like that, have a chat [pobazarit’]
Pelevin laments the venal (capitalist) motivations undermining any attempt at authentic communication. But he also refuses to answer questions directly, laces responses with sexist come-ons, and deflates the conversation with 1990s slang, borrowed from the emergent gangster culture. “He likes to use ‘gangster speech’ mixed with abstract concepts” writes Dobrotvorskaia. “He often repeats:
— если у нас такой серьезный базар... (“if we’re being serious”)
— если говорить по серьезке... (“to speak seriously”)
— меня вот какая мысль прорубает... (“a thought just cut through me”)
— сказал так конкретно... (“said it like that concretely”)
— меня что пробило... (“what just beat through me”)
— фишка в том... (“thing is”)
— чисто да... (“cleanly yes”)
— у меня свои предъявы... (“I have my own clarities”)
— он своим умом проник во все дырки... (“he made it through all the holes himself”)
— я вообще не первую жизнь тут нахожусь... (“I’m not living my first life here”)
— ты не гони... (“don’t get started”)
— меня на думку прошибает, на сердце... (“knocks through my mind, heart”)
The performance resonates with the novel Pelevin is promoting, but Dobrotvorskaia sees something more substantial. Pelevin’s language, she writes, is a “strange and very energetic combination” with a specific purpose. “Once he [Pelevin] himself said that the gangster lexicon [leksika bratkov] has enormous power, and that the Russian language, having fallen sick in the speech of intellectuals, was resurrected in the criminal markets, revitalized through the primordial concepts of life and death.”
The interview—like Pelevin’s fictional work—stages a collision of discourses and suggests the regenerative potential of such a collision. Though both Generation ‘P’ and Pelevin’s authorial performance around it were staged as satire (and are often read as such), they participated in and helped build both the language and practice of post-Soviet capitalism at the beginning of the new millennium.
Pelevin, Victor
Moscow
Karina Dobrotvorskaia, “Bratok po razumu [Interview/profile of Viktor Pelevin],” Vogue, No. 9 (September 1999): 40–43.