Volume 45, Number 11 · June 25, 1998
Under the Overcoat
By John Bayley
The Life of Insects
by Victor Pelevin, Translated from the Russian by Andrew Bromfield
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 179 pp., $22.00
Omon Ra
by Victor Pelevin, Translated from the Russian by Andrew Bromfield
New Directions, 154 pp., $9.95 (paper)
Russian writers of the nineteenth century—Dostoevsky set the example—used to say they had all come out from under Gogol's 'Overcoat.' Many of the younger ones could say the same today about Yury Miloslavsky—of all the post-1970s Russian writers, the blackest in humor, the most streetwise, most nihilistic and disillusioned. Disillusioned not only about the old Soviet system but about those who resisted it, the heroic dissidents, those 'various Solzhenitsyns,' as the hero of Victor Pelevin's novel Omon Ra vaguely refers to them.
Review, 3025 words
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