Since the 1980s, Victor Pelevin has been a leading literary voice in post-Soviet Russia, exposing the disorder of his beloved country with biting wit and black humor. In his latest dystopian novel, "Homo Zapiens," Pelevin focuses on the world of Russian advertising, often with hilarious results.
Babylen Tatarsky, a sales assistant at a Moscow newsstand, stumbles onto a job as a copywriter in Yeltsin's Russia, where the shady, wealthy clients often get shot by the mafia before they can pay him for his work. The challenge of his new job is tailoring Western ads for a Russian market unaccustomed to the values they represent. The slogans crafted by Tatarsky ("DIAMONDS ARE NOT FOREVER! THE BROTHERS DEBIRSIAN FUNERAL PARLOUR" are a dark blending of high and low culture that he considers more appropriate for the Russian temperament.
Looking for meaning in a country with a drunken president, daily assassinations of prominent social figures, a bloody conflict in Chechnya and a tightly controlled media oligarchy isn't easy, so Tatarsky turns to unconventional sources. In his search for guidance, he uses an Ouija board to channel the ghosts of Che Guevara and Dostoevski. Tatarsky comes to view reality as an illusion -- one as insubstantial as a television transmission.
Advertising as ideology
If advertising (and the Western influence it represents) has truly become the ideological successor to communism, supplanting Russia's own identity, then Tatarsky, as copywriter, might be more powerful than he ever imagined.
The rendering of Tatarsky's hallucinogenic journey confirms Pelevin's status as one of today's most boldly adventurous literary minds. Weaving Russian and Western literature and pop culture with ancient Egyptian myth and Buddhism, Pelevin creates a multi-layered world where ideas, not characters, are the protagonists. "Homo Zapiens" is a comic, philosophical tour de force, but Pelevin's "Omon Ra," a satire of the Soviet space program, remains a more fully realized novel. It's a better place to begin for readers unfamiliar with Pelevin's work.
In Russia, "Homo Zapiens" was published under the more appropriate title of "Generation P," referring to the post-Brezhnev generation that grew up with only one kind of soft drink. "You chose Pepsi when you were young as well -- didn't you?" Tatarsky asks at one point. "What other choice was there?" is the resigned reply.
To take Pelevin's phantasmagoric world solely as a product of a wildly creative imagination would be a mistake. A love of Russia and a profound worry about its future pulses beneath each absurdist scenario. If the intricate verbal and plot machinations were stripped away, an underlying concern that the new Russia has "improved so much that it ceased to exist" would be revealed. Can the excesses of the present and the repressions of the past somehow create a vital new country? Despite a famously irreverent, cynical voice, Pelevin nevertheless argues that yes, they can.
