The idea and image of the world’s end is ubiquitous throughout the history of human consciousness,1 being an essential moment of myth, but a myth that can be stretched into the territory of scientific knowledge. Historically, we see apocalyptic imagery rising in popularity in both periods of deep crises and social melancholy, and in the turbulent moments of revolutionary popular movements (millenarianism, etc.).
Sigmund Freud, in his famous analysis of Dr. Schreber’s delirium, explains the apocalyptic fantasy by the withdrawal of libido from the world objects: The world literally disappears, in fact, not as a body but as a value.
A world-catastrophe . . . is not infrequent during the agitated stage in other cases of paranoia. If we base ourselves on our theory of libidinal cathexis . . . we shall not find it difficult to explain these catastrophes. The patient has withdrawn from the people in his environment and from the external world generally the libidinal cathexis which he has hitherto directed on to them. Thus everything has become indifferent and irrelevant to him, and has to be explained by means of a secondary rationalization as being “miracled up,” “cursorily improvised.”2
To an extent, this psychologizing reflection helps explain the ubiquity of apocalyptic images today: Deprived of absolute frames of reference or of transcendent teleology, people sometimes lose their investment into the things of this world. Depression is a common diagnosis for this condition, and through the intentionality of depression things may indeed present themselves apocalyptically (as becoming immaterial, unreal, evanescent), or alternatively (like in Schreber), as purely internal productions of someone’s mind. Hence the anxiety over a coming apocalypse, or the fantasy of an apocalypse about to happen. In addition to the loss of God or utopian telos, there is also a factor of capital, as famously analyzed by George Lucacs3 (Lucacs, 1971): Since everything can be calculated in quantitative terms, things are disincorporated and appear as precarious figures of an indeterminate continuous substance. Moreover, a minimal analysis of natural consequences of human action shows that this capitalist abstraction is literally realized, and the world is partly disintegrating before our eyes. At least, it is losing its “nonrenewable” energy resources, losing energy tout court.
This entire explanation is the easiest one, but it has the disadvantage of explaining the negative through the negative (a move classically criticized, among others, by Heidegger in his “What is Metaphysics?”4). Basically, this explanation goes, the apocalyptic anxiety is justified. An apocalypsis—at least an affective, a value apocalypsis—is indeed happening, and the apocalyptic imagination is another expression of nihilism. Not that this interpretation is wrong, but it is not a complete picture.
In fact, the sense of things losing ground emerges as much when they retreat from reach, as when they suddenly and brightly happen. The world of apocalypse is a spectacular, interesting world, the world of manifestation (apo-kalypto). In its disclosure, it risks losing ground; the predicate faces the disappearance of its subject. And this is what is anguishing. Heidegger, who otherwise shares Freud’s nihilistic scenario, sees this aspect of the problem right in his “Question Concerning Technology.”5 It is, paradoxically, because technology is a genuine way of disclosing nature’s inner potential that its meaning for the human world can be disastrous: The very quid of nature, its secret, seems to be dissolving, and the resulting technical effects, as a result, start looking unreal.
This leads us further to appreciate the special role that art and the media play in the apocalyptic process. The present fashion of apocalypse in art did not start yesterday. It has been gradually coming to its rights, starting with the dark mood of the fin de siècle in the nineteenth century and the advent of modernism. At first it was bound by the conventions of minimal realism and secularism, and it turned to literal apocalypse only in the face of actual disasters, such as the world wars. However, apocalypse fast became a constitutive fantasy rather than an external occasion for writing. The fashion of apocalyptic visions started in the 1930s but ultimately established itself only by the 1970–1980s with the new antiwar sentiments and the pessimistic turn of Hollywood cinema (Apocalypse Now, later Jurassic Park, Terminator, etc.). It is in the same period that high modernist art retrospectively conceptualized itself as “writing of catastrophe.” Maurice Blanchot, in his seminal book of aphorisms Writing the Disaster,6 seems to equate a certain radical, neo-romantic mode of literary writing—fragmentary, impersonal, disorienting—with an experience of a “disaster” that is not a total destruction but something that emerges through art as being indestructible. This connection was not that evident in the early twentieth century when the occasional depictions of disasters with modernist means (Beckman, Dix, Picasso) coexisted with the use of these means for purely expressive, spiritualist, or even utopian purposes. A question of chicken and egg may be asked, with no decisive answer, about the relation between the impact of actual terrible events and the internal tendency of modernist art to destroy the world it creates.
Among the first instances of fictional catastrophic writing in the West were Karel Capek’s R.U.R. (1920) and War with the Newts (1936).7 His peer disaster writer from the Soviet Union, Andrei Platonov, wrote a harshly critical review, accusing Capek of a pessimistic unilateral view of technology.8 But previously Platonov himself, while positively depicting miraculous and utopian machines of the future, put them into the human context of devastation and failed struggle for survival.9 Paradoxically, in Platonov’s world, the enthusiasm of revolution and happiness produced by technology seem to produce in humans a state of exhaustion and fatigue.
It appears to me that the logic of apocalyptic writing is triple.
First, there is a modernist intention of disincorporating the work of art in favor of pure form or of the formless mimetic medium, and in some cases also of the infinite artistic genius, even though the very figure of the author is questioned by this tendency too. The turn of art toward “abstraction” can be read as a gesture of sublimation or spiritualization,10 as a turn toward narcissistic autonomy,11 or as a self-undermining of art as a practice and institution.12 Throughout the twentieth century, modernism increasingly moves toward ironic self-undermining and reflexive questioning of the “artistic” nature of its image—a tendency highly characteristic already of symbolism13 and later flourishing in the so-called postmodernism. This adds to the potential of the “end of the world” narratives as they motivate the end of the fictional worlds in question.
Second, there is the spectacular value and attraction of mass destruction that can be exploited even by the popular culture industry under the “alibi” pretext of taking a negative moral stance on fear, warning, and moral condemnation. There is undeniably a measure of negation and destruction here. But they function less as a diagnosis and more as a mode of enjoying and affirming something else than the image (which is destroyed): the pure force of spectacle, and the unstoppable multiplication of attractions that risk to tear apart the continuity of objects and the story, and the verisimilarity of the plot, threatening both the substance and the subject. The manifestation detaches itself from the world that manifests itself and destroys it. Thus, the condition of apocalypse in art and media is not only nihilism as such but, equally, sensationality, speed, and the richness of infinitely multiplying events. The “overexposure” of the “information bomb” that Paul Virilio so eloquently describes14 is in itself a force of destruction of the human subject and of all its subject matter. All this shows that the phenomenon of apocalypse is something that does not just testify to the erosion of things but gestures toward their hidden core, be it thing or subject.
There is, however, a third reason that we will see developing further. This is the imaginary emergence of evil that destroys the world through a specific monstrous apparition. In logical terms, this is a determinate, not abstract, negation of cosmos. Indeed, in the recent Hollywood apocalyptic movies, the world does not just disappear; there is a giant dinosaur, atomic explosion, or vagabond planet that kills it. In the same way, in Christianity the end of the world is prefigured by the Antichrist.
Apocalyptic redemption, and God as redeemer, necessarily appears as destructive of being, as “anti-world.”15 Therefore there is a tendency, in the apocalyptic thinking, for God to redouble itself dialectically. Thus, in the Apocalypse and its reception, “Antichrist,” originally written as “Ante-Christ,” can also mean “an impostor disguised as Christ” as well as “Christ’s predecessor” (Ante-Christ) who prefigures him, destroys the world, and whom Christ then overcomes in a sort of negation of negation.16 In Gnostic thought, the relationship is inverted: It is the conservative positive God who is evil, and the true God comes as a destructive liberating force. To use a much later formula by Goethe, “nemo contra Deum nisi Deus ipse.”17 God, Antichrist, or both, reveal, explain, and impersonate the negative force of history that draws it toward the end. But fortunately this force negates itself too, turns against itself.
Let me now stick to Soviet-Russian literature for a while. As I mentioned, it was preoccupied by the visions of disaster from early on. For Andrei Platonov, author of dark narratives about revolutionary nomads trying to build Communism as well as various miraculous machines in a complete void, the main issue is the subject. “You’ll exhaust yourself and die, and who will then be the people?”18 “I don’t exist, I just think here.”19 In a repeatedly used figure, Platonov gives his characters famous names and casually calls them by these new names, thus questioning the subjecthood of a literary character as someone whose identity is only given by his/her name. A peasant from Tchevengur takes himself the name of Dostoyevsky instead of the comic “Ignatiy Moshonkov,”20 and the author refers to him simply as “Dostoyevsky” for the rest of the novel (where he and his fellow Communist villagers exterminate one another and the rest are finished by the entering soldiers).
Vladimir Nabokov, Platonov’s apparent antipode, was a noble who fled the 1917 Russian Revolution and strongly hated it. Not surprisingly, it is in his prose that the apocalyptic tendencies that were implicit in the early Russian symbolism were fully developed. A typical ending of Nabokov’s novels gradually disorders discourse (its consistency, grammar, etc.), thus producing an incoherent text close to stream of consciousness. This is motivated as an ironic de-realization of the story: The preceding narrative appears as a mad vision of the protagonist21 or, inversely, as a gaze at the material reality taken from a postmortem/paradisiac state.22 This trope was maybe most brilliantly used in the Pale Fire,23 where the story is presented from two different perspectives: that of professor Kinbote and that of an exiled king of a country named Zembla (spoiled Russian for “Land”). It gradually turns out that the story of a king is a delusion of professor Kinbote himself, and the whole fictional world falls apart as a result of this discovery, itself triggered by the murder of the character’s poetic double, Shade—a subjective “end of the world.” But the final judgment on the reality of characters is left to the reader. Perhaps it is yet another character, absent from the novel’s stage, a Russian émigré named Botkin, who imagines himself to be all those characters at once. It is important that Nabokov chooses a king as the ultimate “subject” of the disastrous story of three persons. It is as though the kingly status would be the only way to save and determine the unity of a dissolving world.
Let me now finally turn to the main subject of this paper—the contemporary Russian writer Viktor Pelevin, arguably the most important and popular prose writer of the post-Soviet period, the only one who managed to combine a reputation among the broad public and the literary critics. Pelevin started his career as a Soviet science fiction writer but quickly moved into a more free fantasy world that roughly follows the cyberpunk tendency, adding vampire plots, drugs, and a very seriously taken Buddhist mysticism. But this explosive mix is unchangeably used to present a political commentary on the situation in Russia and beyond. For instance, Generation P24 is a story of a spin doctor—Pelevin calls him a “creator,” in the full sense of the word—who ends up becoming a living “god” of the Russian media space and managing a machine that entirely invents and counterfeits reality in TV news. Empire V (2004) describes a monopolistic group of vampires who suck from earth a mysterious substance of happiness that combines the features of money and oil.
Mysticism only emphasizes the actual political content of the novel. The same is true of Pelevin’s “international” short stories, such as the “Macedonian Critique of French Thought,”25 where “to restore the balance of energy in the Eurasian space” that had been undermined by the unilateral transfer of oil from Russia to Western Europe, the protagonist builds in France an enterprise that makes prisoners read the works of Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, Baudrillard, and Houellebecq; whips them on every page they read; and transfers 360 euro to Russia at every stroke.
In most novels of Pelevin, the world ends in disaster. Or at least, like in Generation P26 and Sacred Book of Werewolf (Pelevin 2009),27 it is constantly threatened by a five-legged apocalyptic hound, “Pizdets” (the word is obscene slang for “total disaster,” the root referring to female genitalia in the sense of an all-swallowing abyss). “Pizdets” is translated, not quite successfully, by Andrew Bromfield into English as “Phukkup.” I suggest to translate it less obscenely but more precisely as “Fiasco,” instead.
One of these gods was the lame dog Pizdets [Fiasco] with five legs. In the ancient chronicles he was indicated by a large letter “P” with two commas. Tradition says he sleeps somewhere among the snow, and while he sleeps, life goes along more or less OK; but when he wakes up, he attacks. When that happens, the land won’t yield crops, you get Yeltsin for president, and all that kind of stuff. Of course, they didn’t actually know anything about Yeltsin, but overall it’s pretty similar.28
The most characteristic is perhaps the early Chapaev and Void (1996),29 where the general of the Russian Civil War (1918–1924), Vasiliy Chapaev, builds a magical machine gun out of Buddha’s finger and thus destroys the whole world. However, this is not the end of the novel, because subsequently the main character, Petr, wakes up in a psychiatric clinic in today’s Russia and is told that all of this was his hallucination. But this too is dubious: The narrative points of view are given as equivalent. And the hero gradually comes to the conclusion that the world that he woke up in was in fact a fiction composed by Grygory Kotovsky—in real history another famous Red Army general, but in the novel a “famous mystic” who emigrated to Paris and there, according to the suspicion of Petr, created a grotesque illusion of 1990s Russia (with its mixture of Soviet and Western life). In response, Petr publicly tells a joke about Kotovsky, where his bald head gets pierced and explodes like a bubble. Then he recites a poem about the void, shoots from a pen into the lamp, and thus gets back into the alternative universe of civil war, where he meets Chapaev again.
Another novel entitled T30 (Pelevin, 2009) has the protagonist “T,” or Lev Tolstoy, who turns out to be an action superhero, master of a “nonviolent resistance” (in fact a virtuoso of lethal fighting skill). He constantly encounters a demonic character, “Ariel” (with a pun on “a-real”), who claims to be the author of his story. In the end the two fight over who of them includes the other in his story, and T ends up as the “true” author of the novel.
Apart from the theme of unmasked authorship, there is in Pelevin an equally important motif of a targeted symbolic blow. Thus, in the “Anti-Air Complexes of Al-Efesbi,”31 Pelevin describes a Russian ex-FSB32 agent who learns how to down American drones in Afghanistan by presenting to their cameras some impossibly insulting and problematic messages (we learn only fragments, such as “greenspan bernanke jewish” (“rothschild / federal reserve / Bilderberg group / world government”). Supposedly they freeze the system that is responsible for justifying each shot of the drone to US taxpayers. In another story from the same collection, “Operation “Burning Bush,”33 FSB talks to George Bush from inside his tooth with a voice of a fake “God.” This “God” is in fact a Russian Jew who is given heavy drugs and then has to listen to mystical theological literature. As he describes it, under drugs these words “sounded otherwise than a usual human speech. They seemed to cut through, by consciousness by fully occupying it by their meaning and became the only and ultimate reality while they sounded.34 “I became prey of every whisper that reached me,”35 while the authors “couldn’t imagine that their words would transform into psychic reality in the brain of a person suspended amidst black eternity and deprived of our usual immunity to other’s speech.”36 George Bush, to whom this newly converted “mystic” speaks through his tooth, experiences a similar effect of direct penetration by words, and thus the FSB convinces him to start the war in Iraq and do other catastrophic things.
The phrase about the “usual immunity to other’s speech” is a latent reference to the philosophy of a great Soviet thinker, Boris Porshnev, author of an original theory of human evolution.37 The following lines in the “Codes of Al-Efesbi” also refer to Porshnev:
My ancestors were hairy low-headed corpse-eaters who chiselled skulls and bones of the carrion that was rotting along the river, and sucked the decomposing brains out. They did it for millions of years, using same silicon chisels, without any idea why this happens to them—just following their instinct, like the birds who nest or beavers who build dams. They did not mind eating each other as well. But then a demon of intelligence descended upon Earth and taught them the magic of words. The herd of apes became humanity and started their vertiginous ascendance by the stairway of language. And now I stand at the crest of history and see that the highest point has been passed. I was born after the last battle for the soul of humanity was lost. But I heard its echo and saw its farewell lightnings.38
To Porshnev, early humans first elaborated language as a means of hypnosis and thus became powerful and cruel destroyers. Only subsequently, there emerged a new counter-language that allowed others to protect themselves, and the proper contemporary humans emerged against their dark intermediate ancestors. Pelevin is probably attracted not just to the reflections on hypnotic language-weaponry (so close to his own) but also to the logic of negation of negation at the origin of history that is so uncannily similar to the apocalyptic theories about its end (emergence of a dark master that is then overcome in a new turn of destruction). Here, however, Pelevin departs from his usual Gnostic/Buddhist spiritualism (there is also a next higher world out there after this one is finished) and imparts his character with an eschatological pessimism (the last battle—against the Antichrist?—is lost, etc.) in which the language, being a negative force, ultimately destroys itself for good: a negative dialectic not so unlike the Frankfurt school’s “Hotel Abyss.”
A more recent39 piece by Pelevin, Love of Three Zukerbrins, tells of an explosion in an opposition newspaper made by an Islamic terrorist. This is, however, only the apparent form of a more fundamental drama in which the protagonist is given clairvoyance and then persecuted by the demonic “angry birds.” These angry birds want to kill God, who takes the image of a fat pig, and use humans for this purpose (throwing them into God like they throw birds themselves in the famous game). The tactic is to take a person, make her suffer enormously, and crush God by this overwhelming sentiment of darkness. All of this leads to the aforementioned explosion, which in the dream of the victim is an atomic bomb exploding the entire Earth. It is an end of a particular world but not of the world as such: The protagonist survives by traveling among many worlds and learning that one of his former colleague creates such worlds.
All of this is radical but familiar, in principle, from “postmodern” literature. But I want to emphasize four points that are special in the context.
1. For Pelevin, like for Nabokov, the “end of the world” is a way to reflect on and to express the fictionality of literature, and at the same time to overcome it by making the text repeatedly denounce itself as a mere hallucination. While for Nabokov the realistic motivation for this trope was a nostalgic sense of loss and a transcendent status of consciousness, for Pelevin it is primarily the sense of the degree to which contemporary reality is constructed, subjectively and symbolically, by the state and by the media: constructed not just as a “simulacrum,” but in its very being. Contemporary everyday reality is then structured as art, which makes it into an object of nice and funny literature but always puts it at the verge of disappearance. Even if this reality is not in fact a fruit of a secret conspiracy—and Pelevin makes this clear by presenting such theories as grotesque—it is structured as though it was someone’s conspiracy. The motivation for this is again the degree to which our world is an object of rational planning, of rationalist reflection, and at the same time is highly aestheticized, bombarding a subject with fictional or mythic narratives and images. The two together, rationality and art, in their unity and contradiction, build up a sentiment of de-realization and de-subjectivation that is explored in the cyberpunk aesthetics in general and in Pelevin in particular. Pelevin is special, because the Russian society he lives in is even more constructible than others, because of a recent revolution that loosened a sense of reality and untied imagination, while at the same time raising stakes for a highly rational strategic behavior, and of an imitative attitude of this society toward the Western established models of policy. This all taken together has led, in Russia, to a magic belief in the power of media that became self-fulfilling. One can look at the current “non-war” in Ukraine that is made possible by a creation of a fictional world by Russian television.40 Pelevin anticipated and influenced this kind of special operations. This is also a reason his writing is so concerned with shielding, protecting the reader. A disaster is framed as an end of the world in the consoling sense that the world had not been real to start with and, even more importantly, the novel’s universe, with its sometimes chthonic nauseating images, is just literature, just fiction. And the same is true of the terror stories ubiquitous in news media. Hence also the importance of Porshnev for Pelevin: the thinker who, like much later Paolo Virno,41 saw language both as a danger of mastery and as a capacity of protection against it. The literary apocalyptic revelations play a role of “no” that allows them to weaken the power of discourse.
2. Together with the image of end and “void,” where the world dissolves like a theater play (in Buddha’s Little Finger, Pelevin explicitly quotes Blok’s “Puppet Show”) or a card pack, Pelevin has a figure of the world’s author—who is himself, at the same time, its character. Somewhat similar to Nabokov’s Pale Fire, Pelevin constantly performs a sublimation of such figures. At the same time, there is irony, such as also is present in Nabokov but even more so in Platonov, whose treatment of “Dostoyevsky” is not unlike the usage by Pelevin of “Chapaev” and “Tolstoy” as action genre characters (and generally his usage of the mass culture signifiers in all his novels for nominating new characters). Subject is a missing desideratum of such apocalyptic literature, and one should boldly usurp its role. Sally Dalton-Brown42 notices the role of the reflective images in Pelevin’s prose and suggests that this is a post-modern “impotence” of an author whose characters start overwhelming him and he himself is degraded to the level of a character. But isn’t there another process in action, by which the author, previously invisible, gets incarnated and redoubled (as in Pelevin’s novel T)? Then there is a double role: Tatarsky, in Homo Zapiens, invents the scripts of media and is their main protagonist. This is a powerful scheme, a trap for the mind of a spectator, which reminds of Freud’s theory of mass leadership as occupying at once the positions of role model (= subject) and love object.
Typically, Chapaev, himself an idealized character of Soviet war mythology, becomes in Pelevin a titanic theological guru, which is at the same time comical and persuasive, since the crypto-theological content of Soviet culture gets literalized: literally revealed. The same, with even more comical elements, happens to Kotovsky and Lev Tolstoy. Of course these are not transcendent figures but themselves novel characters, and Pelevin emphasizes that from the objective (Buddhist) point of view these personalities don’t exist at all—“not ‘I think’ but ‘think I’”—they are themselves images. The “living God” in Generation P is just the most popular image, not an omnipotent master. But this irony only reinforces sublimation. Unlike the classical genius, this postmodern author/hero plays and displays a public role. This has a clear sociopolitical meaning: Even before the current Russian political regime started showing features of a personalistic autocracy, Pelevin noticed the role of a messianic personality in a world that is so much suffering from apocalyptic anxiety, alias anxiety of de-realization and de-substantialization. This personality is not a god but rather a hero: Compare Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose current legitimacy rests less on a genuine belief in the picture built by TV propaganda, but rather on the respect for an extra-class spin doctor who managed to organize such a bright propaganda campaign and is, at the same time, projecting his own figure as a protagonist of this film (like Pelevin’s spin doctor and living god Vavilen Tatarsky from the novel Homo Zapiens).
3. One attributes the world to God before destroying it, but there is also a symmetrical task of killing God or at least of punishing him for the construction of this world. Not just idolatry of authors, but also idoloclasm, violence against authority figures. Here, an apocalyptic scenario, or at least a script of a disaster, is not just an undoing of a once-created world, but an anti-construction that permits such undoing. You need to invent such an evil that would be impossible within the system and would make it annul itself: In Buddha’s Little Finger the direct annihilation of the world by Buddha’s finger is first tried. But then, when Petr discovers that the world he lives is invented by Kotovsky, and he cannot just erase him, he composes an insulting poem that speaks of piercing Kotovsky’s bald skull with a pen. And this finally seems to work, as the world around him dissolves indeed. Then, in Pelevin’s work, follow the antimissile tables of Skotenkov, the deicidal torture of humans by angry birds, the “Macedonian” torture of French citizens as a means to restore the geopolitical balance of mind and matter:43 All of these are the case-specific horrible anti-fantasies that remind of Lacan’s “real” (and of Žižek’s use of it).
Strictly speaking, these constructions are not “ends of world,” but they are clearly related to Pelevin’s apocalyptic images. Philosophically speaking, the logic is clear: It is not enough to simply deny, devalue, or negate the world for it to dissolve itself. Particularly if this is a constructed world as, Pelevin is convinced, is always the case with any world. It is not enough to “deconstruct”; one needs to attack the author with an anti-construction: A contrary force is a vehicle to enforce a negative statement that otherwise would just remain a theoretical clause. In Kantian terms, the nihil privativum is indispensable to realize the nihil negativum.
Out of his contemporaries, Pelevin is similar here to Lars von Trier who, on his part, also likes to construct artificial unbearable images meant to shock the spectator and to please the evil God. Rosalind Galt, in her fine analysis of von Trier’s film Melancholia (2010), calls this a “trolling” of the spectator and explains this by a sadomasochist contract between the two.44 Pelevin is less cruel to the reader: He tries to present the same mechanism in a distant, detached way.
4. The issue of apocalypse in Pelevin is not only subject but also substance. Pelevin abundantly shows the role of liquid energetic substances, such as oil (“shit of dead dinosaurs,” as he calls it), or bablos, a mystical beverage combining money with hypnotic enjoyment, in the fantastic worlds he describes. In a world with a deficit of reality, and at the same time with an overexposure of images, such substances seem to be so many magical ways both to restore reality and, eventually, to destroy it. And there is always not enough of these substances.
In the Russian case, there is a loss of reality and a loss of matter connected to the revolutionary devaluation of the Soviet past. In Buddha’s Little Finger, Pelevin’s protagonist goes mad in 1919 and wakes up in 1992: The entire period in between is omitted in the novel. This is the “void” to which its Russian title, Chapaev and Void, alludes. An action “in absolute void,” as is described in the novel, is also an art of life in a historical void, which, paradoxically, Pelevin’s literary work tries to fill in with matter. The machine gun supposed to destroy the entire world by Buddha’s finger is not by chance made of clay, the paradigmatic raw material. Oil, which emerges as a key material and mystical force in the Sacred Book of Werewolf and the Macedonian Critique of French Thought, is also a substance drawn from the distant past that we are thus feeding on, thus filling in the holes of recent memory.
Strangely, nature plays a large role in Pelevin’s cyberpunk worlds. He likes describing landscapes and idealizes nature, for instance in the Love of Three Zuckerbrins, where green plants emerge at the end as a healthy force prevailing over virtual reality. It is this natural realm that is perhaps most exposed to the material destruction born by the apocalyptic forces. Following a good old Russian tradition stemming from Nikolai Fyodorov and his idea of material resurrection, Pelevin develops a materialist apocalypse in a world that is either reduced to sheer matter at the verge of extinction or, on the contrary, holds on to its matter as a way to fill in the void of symbolic extermination. Matter emerges as a fragile substratum of this world as well as, at the other pole, a dark instrument of its destruction.
To sum up, Pelevin does not just describe a crumbling world of pure images and signifiers, a chaos that would come to replace the quasi-theological Soviet frame of reference. He describes a post-revolutionary and permanently revolutionary world, where everything must be reconstructed and reinvented: a world that is analogous to modern art in that it is ideally constituted from top to bottom and therefore risks losing its substantiality. What is being so easily destroyed must have been artificially created. The subject and the substance, which are constantly being lost in this world due not just to the growing alienation of an individual but equally to the rapid and plural development, return as sublime names and images of heroes/creators and of fetishized money. Apocalypse is not just motivated by the melancholic withdrawal of value, but by an active symbolic revolt of heroes against the world, which turns out to be a world, and against its masters. A constructivist, Cartesian, personalistic, Buddhist, theoclastic, materialist, mystical apocalyptica. Prose of fiasco, poetry of inversion, rhetoric of denunciation.
Notes
1. Karl Löwith, Meaning in History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011 [1949]); Jacob Taubes, De l’eschatologie occidentale (Paris: Éditions de l’éclat, 2009).
2. Sigmund Freud, Collected Works, standard edition, vol. 12 (London: Hogarth Press, 1958), pp. 69–70.
3. Georgy Lucacs, History and Class Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971).
4. Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008), pp. 89–110.
5. Ibid., pp. 307–42.
6. Maurice Blanchot, Writing the Disaster (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995 [1980]).
7. Karel Capek, R.U.R. (London: Penguin Books, 2004); War with the Newts (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996).
8. Andrey Platonov, Sobranie Sochineniy (Moscow: Vremya, 2011).
9. Andrey Platonov, Chevengur (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1978); Andrey Platonov, Soul (New York: NYRB Classics, 2007).
10. Vassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (New York: Dover, 1977).
11. Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” in Partisan Review 6 (Fall 1939), pp. 34–49.
12. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Poetry as Experience (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).
13. Alexander Blok, “Puppet Show,” in The Slavonic and East European Review, vol. 28, no. 71 (April 1950), pp. 309–22.
14. Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb (New York: Verso, 2005), p. 57.
15. Jacob Taubes, De l’eschatologie occidentale, 48–49.
16. Bernard McGinn, Anti-Christ: Two Thousand Years of the Human Fascination with Evil (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).
17. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Poetry and Truth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 598.
18. Andrey Platonov, The Foundation Pit (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1994), 18.
19. Ibid., p. 13.
20. Platonov, Chevengur, p. 94.
21. Vladimir Nabokov, The Defense (New York: Vintage Books, 1990).
22. Vladimir Nabokov, Transparent Things (New York: Penguin, 2012); Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading (New York: Penguin, 2012).
23. Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (New York: Penguin, 2012).
24. Viktor Pelevin, Homo Zapiens (New York: Penguin Books, 2002 [1999]).
25. Viktor Pelevin, Dialektika Perekhodnogo Perioda Iz Niotkuda v Nikuda (Moscow: Eksmo, 2003), pp. 265–302.
26. Pelevin, Homo Zapiens.
27. Viktor Pelevin, Sacred Book of Werewolf (New York: Penguin Books, 2009 [2004]).
28. Pelevin, Homo Zapiens, pp. 229–30.
29. Viktor Pelevin, Buddha’s Little Finger (New York: Penguin Books, 2001 [1996]).
30. Viktor Pelevin, T (Moscow: Eksmo, 2009).
31. Viktor Pelevin, Ananasnaya Voda Dlya Prekrasnoy Damy, (Moscow: Eksmo, 2011), pp. 145–236.
32. FSB is the Russian Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti (Federal Security Service).
33. Pelevin, Ananasnaya Voda Dlya Prekrasnoy Damy, pp. 7–144.
34. Ibid., p. 46.
35. Ibid., p. 47.
36. Ibid.
37. Boris Porshnev, O Nachale Chelovecheskoy Istorii (Saint Petersburg: Aletheya, 2007). See my forthcoming “Boris Porshnev’s Dialectic of History,” Stasis, vol. 4, no. 1 (2017).
38. Pelevin, Ananasnaya Voda Dlya Prekrasnoy Damy, p. 224.
39. Viktor Pelevin, Love of Three Zukerbrins (Moscow: Eksmo, 2014).
40. Petr Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia (London: Public Affairs, 2014).
41. Paolo Virno, Il saggio sulla Negazione (Rome: Bollati Boringhieri, 2013).
42. Sally Dalton-Brown, “Looking for the Creator: Pelevin and the Impotent Writer in T” (2009) and “Ananasnaia Voda Dlia Prekrasnoi Damy” (2011), in The Modern Language Review, vol. 109, no. 1 (January 2014), pp. 199–218.
43. Pelevin, Dialektika Perekhodnogo Perioda Iz Niotkuda v Nikuda, pp. 265–302.
44. Rosalind Galt, “The Suffering Spectator? Perversion and Complicity in Antichrist and Nymphomaniac,” in Theory and Event, no. 1 (2015).