Volume 51, Number 20 · December 16, 2004
Subversive Activities
By Keith Gessen
Angels on the Head of a Pin
by Yuri Druzhnikov, translated from the Russian by Thomas Moore
Peter Owen/UNESCO, 566 pp., $37.95
Ice (Lyod)
by Vladimir Sorokin
Moscow: Ad Marginem, 317 pp.
The Dialectics of the Transition Period from Nowhere to Nothing (Dialektika Perehodnogo Perioda iz Niotkuda v Nikuda)
by Viktor Pelevin
Moscow: Eksmo, 384 pp.
'The Europeans look at us like we're shit, like we're animals!' Vovchik the Small, one of Victor Pelevin's angst-ridden mobsters, declares in the 1999 Generation P. 'It's because we don't have a national i-den-ti-ty.' Vovchik may as well have been speaking of Pelevin's writerly colleagues. What began as a wonderful new start for artistic freedom—with Pelevin, in his first major publication, dismissing the dissident movement with a reference to 'various Solzhenitsyns'—has become, instead, a continuous existential headache. Some have abandoned the craft entirely, others have begun to write for politicians and the movies, while still others have taken the prophetic leanings of the older generation in unexpected directions—the repatriated memoirist Edward Limonov, for one, recently left prison after serving two years for the illegal purchase of some Kalashnikov rifles. On the more serious charge, of plotting to invade Kazakhstan, he was acquitted.
Review, 5646 words
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