Our quest for the Russian soul continues. :)
This time a bit more contemporary. NYT says about the book: „Generation P,'' was a … sensation in Russia, selling more than 200,000 copies. The book tracks the adventures of a skeptical intellectual, Vavilen Tatarsky, who becomes a kopiraiter -- an advertising copywriter -- adrift in a glamorously corrupt Moscow. He spends his days devising Russian versions of Western slogans: ''Gucci for Men -- Be a European, Smell Better.''
The title is clearly a reference to America's jaded Generation X. But what does the ''P'' mean? ''It could mean any one of three things,'' Pelevin says. ''It could stand for Pepsi, or Pelevin, or'' -- he uses a vulgar Russian slang term that can be translated loosely as ''absolute catastrophe'' -- or all three of these at once.'' So Pelevin's generation of liberal freedoms and designer excesses is also the generation of criminality, corruption and despair. ''I feel disgusted by everything about my country,'' he says. ''In the Soviet times you could escape from the evil of the state by withdrawing into the private spaces of your own head; but now the evil seems to be diffused everywhere. We are all tainted by it.''
Spend any time in Moscow and you will soon discover that no other writer polarizes opinion quite like Victor Pelevin. To the influential critic Andrei Nemzer, he is an ''infantile writer producing books for an infantile society.'' To Igor Shaitanov, a professor of literature at the Russian State Humanities University, Pelevin is a ''phony'' whose fiction has a ''dangerous emptiness.'' And yet, step outside the cloistered world of Moscow's literary intelligentsia, and you will find fierce adherents. Natasha Perova, the editor who first discovered him, calls Pelevin ''the voice of a generation, who is taking the Russian novel in new directions.''
So let‘s read and discuss Generation P and see what we make of it.
