About book A Werewolf Problem In Central Russia: And Other Stories (2005)
A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia, a collection of short stories, exhibits both the joys and the challenges of reading someone as brilliantly absurd as Russia's Victor Pelevin. The caliber of these stories ranges from surreal to simply impenetrable. At times, Pelevin addresses universal themes with tremendous insight; at other times his satire is so specifically Russian that anyone not well-versed in Russian history will probably find the subject matter difficult to understand. And, although Pelevin appears to be striving for a light mood, at least in some of the stories, the gloomy and pessimistic specter of the former Soviet Union casts its ugly shadow over the volume as a whole.A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia can be seen as both a tribute to Dostoyevsky and as a radical departure from him. These characters are loners who are simply not aware that they are loners. The Tarzan Swing is a Pelevin story that is very reminiscent of Dostoyevsky's story, The Double. It comes as a shock to the protagonist of Tarzan's Swing to realize that he is carrying on a conversation with a companion that might be nothing more than his shadow. Unlike The Double, however, the protagonist in Pelevin's story is never really sure if this "companion" is real or not.All of Pelevin's rather narcissistic characters wander through their post-perestroika days in a dreamlike state obsessing on the meaning of life. They exist outside of themselves and seem to take it in stride that the physical world is compromised by spatial and temporal impossibilities, that a universe exists in a teapot, that dream landscapes are superimposed on real ones and that Russia is but a sewer cover away from China. And, while Dostoyevsky's characters are bogged down by paranoid delusions, Pelevin's characters always seem to find themselves faced with the empty but ultimately self-satisfying prospect of solipsism, and they take it for granted that the world is in a kind of surreal flux.The title story tells the tale of a traveler who becomes hopelessly lost in central Russia and is transformed into a werewolf. Surprisingly, he likes it and he finds it a very liberating experience. This story, told in a linear manner, is no doubt the most accessible of the entire volume. Pelevin gives us stunning detail so we are able to feel how the character moves and smells and sees. The story's placement at the beginning of the collection provides the perfect entree to the lunacy that is Victor Pelevin's trademark.The Ontology of Childhood is more difficult to grasp, especially for those not familiar with Russian history or Russian literature, but it is a more accomplished piece of writing and showcases Pelevin's unique talent most admirably. Written in the second person, The Ontology of Childhood is a chilling recollection of growing up in a prison and blends powerful remembrances of dark pessimism with expressions of profound hope.Pelevin's uncanny ability to render eerie, off-center dreamscapes makes him the Salvador Dali of literature. He is a wordsmith who successfully mixes the sublime with the ridiculous and comes up with wildly turbulent tales that are always more than interesting and thought provoking. They are, in their essence, nothing short of great literature.
It'd be an interesting experiment in sociology to give a group of socio-anthropologists nothing but the canon of distopian/absurdist Russian literature and make them try to extrapolate an idea of what Russian culture is actually like:"We have concluded that the primary export of this theoretical Russian people is the generation and training of cosmonauts and gigantic, steam-driven hammers which are used to smash iron ore. The supernatural is possible with the permission of the Party. All government endeavors (space flight, the army, war) are simulations of their actual equivalent which are, in reality, real."By now, I've managed to get through Zamyatin, Bulgakov, Pelevin, whatever, and while I liked them all, this is a good genre for making me feel like I'm not so in on the joke. I understand Perestroika, Glasnost, etc in only the broadest terms, and while all of this Soviet History for Dummies collegiate stuff makes me feel like I can at least approximate the primary themes of what these books are about, the absurdist satire stuff is sticky because I'm not always sure what they're ridiculing. For me, it's often just a series of wonderfully written, semiotically charged non-sequitors that I just flail away at for those occasional paragraphs of near understanding and resulting self-congratulation. So while I love the what-the-hell-just-happened Soviet/Russian fiction (which doesn't include guys like Nabokov or Dostoevsky, who actually write with a sort of three-dimensionality that doesn't require you to grow up in Soviet Russia or have a master's degree in such to make sense of them), I spend a lot of time on the outside. This isn't to say I didn't think We or The Master and Margarita were very, very, very good, but I still wonder intensely if my reading of them isn't fatally, thoroughly compromised by my non-Russian-ness.This also isn't meant to be a broad commentary on foreign lit - I read Werewolf Problem at about the same time as Mo Yan's Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out, and for all of the latter's zany anthropomorphisms, I didn't feel nearly so in the dark.Werewolf Problem is full of these small moments of alienation. A woman falls through a hole in reality shaped like the USSR to transmogrify into a minor character in a lost Canonical text in one story, a guy bashes his way through the lifesize simulacrum of what seem like Atari-classics in another, it's all very interesting but I can't shake the feeling that this all means something I don't fully understand. The title story and Ontology of Childhood were especially good, even in the partial, halting, self-smacking way I managed to get through them. I recommend this book for the smart, the patient. I'm off to read a graphic novel.
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The dust jacket compares Victor Pelevin's work with Kafka, Bulgakov, Philip K Dick and Joseph Heller, but the comparisons that came to mind for me were with Nikolai Gogol and the Strugatskii brothers. My favourite stories in this book were the title story, and the concluding novella "Prince of Gosplan", which reimagines late-Soviet life as a bunch of computer games: the hero is like a male Lara Croft with worse resolution. If you like surrealism, absurdism and the convolutions in time and space caused by bureaucracy gone mad, this is the book for you.
—Tim
My Amazon review: A book of difficult stories, at best, the first story, "A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia", about a wanderer who happens upon a pack of werewolves, and the last story "Prince of Gosplan", which meshes the real world with the world of computer games, are the two stellar and meaningfully understandable stories in this collection.Whether it is my own ignorance of Russian/Soviet history and life, my lack of philosophical depth, and/or issues of translating Russian to English, the 6 other stories in this collection left me mostly confused and frustrated.In "Vera Pavlovna's Ninth Dream", a bathroom attendant suffers from severe solipsism and its disturbing consequences.In "Sleep", a student succumbs to the belief that everyone around him is "sleeping" through their daily lives.In "Tai Shou Chuan USSR", a Chinese citizen metaphysically becomes a powerful force in the Russian government."The Tarzan Swing" is an alternating tale of death vs. mental illness.In "The Ontology of Childhood", a young child describes what seems to be his life in a prison cell.And "Bulldozer Driver's Day" details the daily life of a working class citizen determined to break out of the mold.All seemingly straightforward, these stories constantly twist and turn through the surreal and metaphysical in ways that, without interpretation, leave the reader in a philosophical fog. I would love to re-read this with expert interpretations as I am sure the insights are fascinating, but as a literary layman I find I may be missing much of the good stuff that I am certain can be found here.
—Jessica
