Viktor Pelevin, "A Sinistra". Moscow: Eksmo, 2025.
In Russia, one must live long – good health allows one to live several different lives in different countries without going anywhere. Even those who are now fifty have experienced, in their conscious age, overripe socialism, the nineties, and Putin.
Audience of PVO
These were at least three completely dissimilar realities – not united by anything except for a few constants. Everything changed – but both 72-year-old Brezhnev and 72-year-old Putin saw one-seventh of the land discussing Alla Pugacheva. In the fifth year of perestroika and in the fifth year of the Russian-Ukrainian war, she was reading a new book by Viktor Pelevin (in 1990, it was "The Monk and the Six-Fingered").
Somehow, Viktor Olegovich Pelevin (PVO) has not yet seriously bored either critics or readers – however, the golden Pelevin times are still behind. This refers not to the times of creating the best Pelevin texts (which remained in the last millennium), but to the maximum correspondence of the writer's offerings to the reader's demand.
The audience of PVO consists of educated urbanites, mainly from the ranks of "iksers" and millennials: children of early and mid-Putin stability. Those who were called creakles and hipsters. This layer had grown sufficiently by the mid-zeros and for another ten years professed well-known relativism, escapism, and a sense of intellectual superiority over others. They greatly appreciated the relaxed Pelevin smirk from above, solipsism in a Buddhist and narcotic setting, and the irony of mass defeat.
Change of Tone
But then the "Russian Spring" blew in from Crimea, and from the West – a "new ethics": in an era of military storms, universal ideologization, and mutual aggression, the otherworldly mocker PVO began to look like an opportunist and was branded a misogynist. For "zoomers," he is already ideologically harmful old stuff.
In recent years, the writer continued from book to book not so much to ignore but only to lightly touch upon, in his own words, the military-political agenda and to mock progressive ideology – however, by 2025, he either sensed a growing divergence from reader needs or simply wanted to change his tone a bit.
In "A Sinistra" – the fifth novel from the "Transhumanism. Inc" universe (about brains in jars and Markus Sorgenfrey) – there is less satire on feminists and crypto-investors and more postmodern quotes and disguises. This time, Markus, investigating the disappearances of brains from jars (the disappeared were clients of a firm called "The Left Path," "A Sinistra" refers to the path to paradise), dresses up as an Italian black magician of the 16th century and plunges into the world of grimoires, inquisitors, and Shakespearean lovers from Verona.
