Awards
Winner of Russia's Booker Prize
Synopses & Reviews
Victor Pelevin is "the only young 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 story collections, continues his Sputnik-like rise. The writers to whom he is frequently compared'"Kafka, Bulgakov, Philip K. Dick, and Joseph Heller'"are all deft fabulists, who find fuel for their fires in society's deadening protocol.
"At the very start of the third semester, in one of the lectures on Marxism-Leninism, Nikita Dozakin made a remarkable discovery," begins the story "Sleep." Nikita's discovery is that everyone around him, from parents to television talk-show hosts, is actually asleep. In "Vera Pavlova's Ninth Dream," the attendant in a public toilet finds that her researches into solipsism have dire and diabolical consequences. In the title story, a young Muscovite, Sasha, stumbles upon a group of people in the forest who can transform themselves into wolves. As Publishers Weeklynoted, "Pelevin's allegories are reminiscent of children's fairy tales in their fantastic depictions of worlds within worlds, solitary souls tossed helplessly among them." Pelevin'"whom Spincalled "a master absurdist, a brilliant satirist of things Soviet, but also of things human"'"carries us in A Werewolf Problem in Central Russiato a land of great sublimity and black comic brilliance.
Review
"[B]rilliantly and poignantly satirizes the economic, cultural and spiritual decay of Mother Russia under Communism....Pelevin's [black fantasies are] almost fable-simple on the surface with strange subterranean currents contorting their helpless protagonists into caricatures and corpses." Publishers Weekly
Review
"A fascinating collection of eight surpassingly strange stories....[M]ost of these stories hum right along, enlivened by the author'ss T.C. Boyle-like genius for mind-bending comic and satiric conceptions....Pelevin's best work reaches levels of satire and fantasy that recall such Russian masters of the thinking-man's grotesque as Gogol, Bulgakov, and Zoshchenko. Marvelous fiction." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"Pelevin is a master absurdist, a brilliant satirist of things Soviet, but also of things human." Spin
Synopsis
The absurd becomes the truth in these magnificent eight short stories by the contemporary post-Soviet Union author.
About the Author
Born in 1962 in Moscow, Victor Pelevin has established a reputation as one of the most brilliant young Russian writers. His work has already been translated into French, Dutch, German, and Japanese. In 1993 he won the little Russian Booker for his short story collection The Blue Latern. His other works include his novella The Yellow Arrow, Omon Ra, and a second volume of stories, A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia.