The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Omon Ra and The Blue Lantern and Other Stories by Victor Pelevin
Mark Lipovetsky

Victor Pelevin. Omon Ra. Trans. Andrew Bromfield. New Directions, 1998. 154 pp. Paper: $9.95; The Blue Lantern and Other Stories. Trans. Andrew Bromfield. New Directions, 1997. 179 pp. $22.95.

Pelevin’s works reminds one of Thomas Pynchon’s, but of course, with a certain Russian twist. Omon Ra, his first novel, dedicated to the “heroes of the cosmos,” is a dark and sad parody of the Soviet space program. The central character, Oman Krizomazov, is obliged to kill himself after fulfilling his duty on the moon only to find out that the entire “flight” was staged somewhere in the underground corridors of the Moscow subway system. However, he is not disappointed: he feels that he found the truth he was searching for his entire life, a truth he has paid for with a lot of pain and suffering and the death of his friends. He believes his suffering, his belief, his devotion made a difference. The false mission transforms into something similar to the ancient rite of initiation; Oman returns from the dead with a godlike wisdom.
In The Blue Lantern and Other Stories, Pelevin’s first short-story collection, the motif of crossing borders—between life and death, between different worlds, across different levels of knowledge—appears repeatedly. Pelevin’s vision of the world’s multiplicity simultaneously contains very ironic and serious elements. In the story “Mid-Game” the flexibility of borders becomes at once funny and shocking: the reader discovers that two Moscow prostitutes are in actuality young former communist league officials who changed their sex, and two male Navy officers, maniacally pursuing the prostitutes, turn out to be former women themselves. In another story, “Crystal World,” the motif is laid bare: Lenin, trying to reach the headquarters of the Bolsheviks just before the October Revolution of 1917, is presented as a demon, changing shapes in order to deceive a modest cadet guarding one of the streets of St. Petersburg. The success of the Revolution depends on this ordinary cadet, especially on his intellectual ability to recognize the metamorphosis, to see the transformations of the world occurring around him.
Pelevin’s talent combines an incredible control of the magic of absurdity with photographically exact renderings of Soviet and post-Soviet realities. The fact is Pelevin is a philosophic writer par excellence. Moreover, his characters are true philosophers. They are always caught in the middle of a very intensive, passionate and bold search for the meaning of life, the universal explanation of being, despite the fact that in Pelevin’s world there are no concrete explanations offered, or if offered they eventually turn out to be mere illusions, void and false. The intensity and seriousness of this search creates a link between the experimental postmodernism of his work and the age-old roots of Russian culture and literature. [Mark Lipovetsky]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Omon Ra and The Blue Lantern and Other Stories by Victor Pelevin Mark Lipovetsky Victor Pelevin. Omon Ra. Trans. Andrew Bromfield. New Directions, 1998. 154 pp. Paper: $9.95; The Blue Lantern and Other Stories. Trans. Andrew Bromfield. New Directions, 1997. 179 pp. $22.95. Pelevin’s works reminds one of Thomas Pynchon’s, but of course, with a certain Russian twist. Omon Ra, his first novel, dedicated to the “heroes of the cosmos,” is a dark and sad parody of the Soviet space program. The central character, Oman Krizomazov, is obliged to kill himself after fulfilling his duty on the moon only to find out that the entire “flight” was staged somewhere in the underground corridors of the Moscow subway system. However, he is not disappointed: he feels that he found the truth he was searching for his entire life, a truth he has paid for with a lot of pain and suffering and the death of his friends. He believes his suffering, his belief, his devotion made a difference. The false mission transforms into something similar to the ancient rite of initiation; Oman returns from the dead with a godlike wisdom. In The Blue Lantern and Other Stories, Pelevin’s first short-story collection, the motif of crossing borders—between life and death, between different worlds, across different levels of knowledge—appears repeatedly. Pelevin’s vision of the world’s multiplicity simultaneously contains very ironic and serious elements. In the story “Mid-Game” the flexibility of borders becomes at once funny and shocking: the reader discovers that two Moscow prostitutes are in actuality young former communist league officials who changed their sex, and two male Navy officers, maniacally pursuing the prostitutes, turn out to be former women themselves. In another story, “Crystal World,” the motif is laid bare: Lenin, trying to reach the headquarters of the Bolsheviks just before the October Revolution of 1917, is presented as a demon, changing shapes in order to deceive a modest cadet guarding one of the streets of St. Petersburg. The success of the Revolution depends on this ordinary cadet, especially on his intellectual ability to recognize the metamorphosis, to see the transformations of the world occurring around him. Pelevin’s talent combines an incredible control of the magic of absurdity with photographically exact renderings of Soviet and post-Soviet realities. The fact is Pelevin is a philosophic writer par excellence. Moreover, his characters are true philosophers. They are always caught in the middle of a very intensive, passionate and bold search for the meaning of life, the universal explanation of being, despite the fact that in Pelevin’s world there are no concrete explanations offered, or if offered they eventually turn out to be mere illusions, void and false. The intensity and seriousness of this search creates a link between the experimental postmodernism of his work and the age-old roots of Russian culture and literature. [Mark Lipovetsky]

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