Andrew (TRN) Bromfield

Victor Pelevin is "the onlyyoung Russian novelist to have made an impression in the West" (Village Voice). A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia, the second of Pelevin's Russian Booker Prize-winning short storycollections, continues his Sputnik-like rise. The writers to whom he isfrequently compared Kafka, Bulgakov, Philip K. Dick, and JosephHeller are all deft fabulists, who find fuel for their fires insociety's deadening protocol. "At the very start of the thirdsemester, in one of the lectures on Marxism-Leninism, Nikita Dozakinmade a remarkable discovery," begins the story "Sleep." Nikita'sdiscovery is that everyone around him, from parents to televisiontalk-show hosts, is actually asleep. In "Vera Pavlova's Ninth Dream,"the attendant in a public toilet finds that her researches intosolipsism have dire and diabolical consequences. In the title story, ayoung Muscovite, Sasha, stumbles upon a group of people in the forestwho can transform themselves into wolves. As Publishers Weeklynoted, "Pelevin's allegories are reminiscent of children's fairy talesin their fantastic depictions of worlds within worlds, solitary soulstossed helplessly among them." Pelevin whom Spin called "a masterabsurdist, a brilliant satirist of things Soviet, but also of thingshuman" carries us in A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia to a land of great sublimity and black comic brilliance.

In a recent New York Times Magazine feature article, Victor Pelevin was cited as "almost alone among his generation of Russian novelists in speaking with a voice authentically his own, and in trying to write about Russian life in its current idiom." Since the publication of this collection of stories, The Blue Lantern, Pelevin's books have been translated into many languages, and Pelevin himself has been touted as a major world writer. The Blue Lantern, winner of the Russian Little Booker Prize, gathers eight of his very best stories. Various, delightful, and uncategorizable, the stories are highly addictive. Pelevin here, as in The Yellow Arrow (New Directions, 1996), Omon Ra (ND, 1997), and A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia (ND, 1998), pays great attention to the meaning of life, in earnest and as spoof. In the title story, kids in a Pioneer camp tell terrifying bedtime stories; in "Hermit and Six-Toes," two chickens are obsessed with the nature of the universe as viewed from their poultry plant; the Young Communist League activists of "Mid-Game" change their sex to become hard-currency prostitutes; and "The Life and Adventures of Shed #XII" is the story of a storage hut whose dream is to become a bicycle.