The Review of Contemporary Fiction
The Clay Machine-Gun by Victor PelevinMichael Pinker
Victor Pelevin. The Clay Machine-Gun. Trans. Andrew Bromfield. Faber and Faber/Harbord Publishing, 1999. 335 pp. £9.99.
This controversial Russian sensation refashions the legend of V. I. Chapaev, a Civil War Red commander of Stalinist fame who, with his adjutant Petka and machine-gunner Anka, reemerged under Brezhnev as the stock ménage of countless dirty jokes. Pelevin makes him guiding spirit of a multi-dimensional fantasy on the unknowable nature of ultimate reality, inhabited by hallucinogen-wired hit men, coked-up revolutionary heroes, jocular shrinks, and hosts of “new Russians” in various guises. What results is the teeming swirl of a narrative kaleidoscope.
The jagged imaginative edge of post-Soviet cynicism haunts a consciousness contending with two compelling nightmares. Pyotr Voyd, Petersburg poet, veers between alternate “realities,” sometimes as “Petka” the Red commissar, at others “Petya,” a nineties mental patient. Lurching unpredictably between harrowing demands on his credulity, Voyd’s disorientation feeds doubts about what he experiences, mimicking Pelevin’s covert rendering of a contemporary Russia hell-bent on chaos.
Voyd as “Petka” performs striking feats as a cavalry commissar under Chapaev, now an outrageously larger-than-life figure of mystical prowess. While “Petka” cannot recall his exploits, Chapaev exalts them, taking him into his confidence, revealing an ultimate scourge, the “clay machine-gun” manned by the gamine Anka. But suddenly Voyd may awaken as “Petya,” restrained, drugged, witnessing the madcap reveries of fellow mental cases, tweaked for his belief in another “life.” While his dreams dissolve and dissemble, Voyd falters but never quite falls.
The temptation to view Pelevin’s sardonic fiction as a fun house mirror reflecting the nature of present-day Russian reality, his audacities a perverse comment on late-twentieth-century futilities, is strong. His severe ironies are exhilarating as caricature. How may the forces contending for belief in our era best be expressed? In this ribald novel Pelevin answers with leering mockery. [Michael Pinker]