Victor Pelevin

Victor Pelevin is one of the most widely read and debated writers to emerge from the post-Soviet world, yet his work speaks far beyond it. This volume offers the first in-depth account of Pelevin as a simultaneously post-Soviet and global author, demonstrating how his fiction mediates between local experience and global, even cosmic systems of power, control, and belief.

Moving beyond readings that cast him either as a postmodernist chronicler of the post-Soviet condition or fully assimilate him into familiar Western paradigms, the contributors demonstrate how his writing constantly navigates between these frameworks. Pelevin’s novels and stories explore a world shaped by multinational capitalism, digital networks of communication, conspiracy thinking, and metaphysical doubt, while remaining firmly rooted in the experience of the post-Soviet transformation. Bringing together international scholars, the volume offers complementary and critical perspectives on Pelevin’s literary qualities, evolving concerns, and the shifting politics of his prose, integrating works that have never been translated.

Taken together, the contributions to this volume present Pelevin as a writer who can be read as iconoclastic, polemical, conformist, or self-reflexive. Yet above all, Pelevin emerges as a writer who is uniquely attuned to the contemporary zeitgeist.