46 интервью с Пелевиным. 46 интервью с писателем, который никогда не дает интервью
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Unusually for a Russian writer, he did not grow up surrounded by writers, intellectuals and dissidents. His parents were part of the old-style Soviet nomenklatura: his father was a military officer, and his mother was an economist from the Russian enclave of the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan. He remembers the long summers of his boyhood being spent happily on a Moscow army base. ’’I really loved the place, actually,’’ he recalls. ’’It was like a big playground full of soldiers, a great place to excite the imagination.’’
Memories from this period informed his first novel, ’’Omon Ra’’ (1993), set during the long stagnation of the Brezhnev years. As a child, Omon is fascinated by flight and deep space and dreams of becoming a cosmonaut, a heroic Soviet man in the model of Yuri Gagarin. In his late teens, he enrolls as a cadet at the Zaraisk flying school and begins a grueling training program. His aptitude and diligence impress the authorities, and soon he is selected to be the sole pilot on a one-way, supposedly ’’unmanned’’ mission to the dark side of the moon. Omon realizes that such a journey means certain death, his death, but he has no choice and sets off for the moon only to discover, at the end of the novel, that his ship never really left the ground, that the entire Soviet space program is an elaborately choreographed fake. Pelevin’s satire, written in the immediate aftermath of Communism’s fall and scornful of the heroic bombast of the past, had all the daring and swaggering hauteur of a young man’s debut. Richard Bernstein, writing in The Times in 1996, praised ’’Ra’’ as ’’wicked, clever and poetic.’’
Pelevin, who studied engineering at the Moscow Institute of Power Engineering, did not begin writing fiction until his mid-20’s, and he was slow to find a readership. After college he worked as a journalist and in advertising as a copywriter (echoes of ’’Generation P’’). He wrote stories in stolen moments. That ’’Omon Ra’’ was published at all owed everything to the acuity of Natasha Perova, who read one of Pelevin’s first published stories, ’’The Blue Lantern,’’ and was excited to see more. ’’When we met up he handed me the manuscript of ’Omon Ra,’’’ she told me. ’’I could see immediately that here was a born writer with his own voice and natural style.’’
’’The Blue Lantern’’ is a magical evocation of childhood wonder. A group of boys at a summer camp spend the night wondering if their lives are but a dream and the world around them a chimera. Perhaps they are even dead, no more than lingering, evanescent spirits. Perhaps they never lived at all. As with much of Pelevin’s early fiction, the story ends on a note of heightened transcendence, with one of the boys lost in a kind of rapture as he peers at the blue lantern burning outside his window, his consciousness teetering on the edge of dissolution, on the very edge of silence. Pelevin’s longing to find moments of repose like this — to elevate himself beyond the white noise of his daily life — may have inspired his interest in Zen Buddhism. Even when he is in Moscow, he spends many hours each week in deep meditation. And his fiction certainly has a hazy, hallucinogenic quality, as if following the trajectory of a drug trip: luminous, allusive, utterly illogical.
While he is in Moscow, his young female fans would be surprised to discover, he still lives with his aged mother. (He kept me away from his apartment, possibly sharing the embarrassment many Muscovites feel about living in cramped high-rise blocks.) His mother leaves him in peace, he explains, and if ’’I know where she is, I don’t have to worry about her all the time.’’ Pelevin has a longstanding girlfriend, Nina, who works in advertising and wants to marry him, but he remains stalled by indecision. ’’Do you think I should get married?’’ he asked me, glancing at my wedding ring. ’’Well, if you love Nina, why not?’’ I said.
’’It’s not such a good idea bringing up children in a country like Russia, and, anyway, I go away so often.’’
’’What does Nina think about that?’’
’’She thinks I’m a fool.’’
How serious, then, is Victor Pelevin? Having spent time with him in Moscow and London, I would venture that there is something genuine in his retreat from fashionable society, in his search for silence amid the clumsy clamor of contemporary life. At the same time, he seems to derive a perverse pleasure from the aura of intrigue that surrounds him. A Buddhist ascetic who enjoys some of the worst excesses of consumer society (Cohiba cigars, late-night partying); a semi-recluse who eagerly engages with and chronicles contemporary life; an author who despises the Russian literati yet welcomes the attention of foreign journalists. Even his dark glasses simultaneously deflect and command attention.
When Pelevin and I were sitting in the sushi bar on the Arbat, there was an abrupt, drenching storm. People ran for cover, taking shelter in shop doorways. When the rain ceased, they began to move again, slowly stretching their limbs. ’’Look at them now,’’ Pelevin said, ’’they look like mannequins coming to life.’’ To me, they simply looked like wet people who had been standing still for a long time. But Pelevin is the kind of writer who can see anything he wants, and this gift for discovering strangeness in the most ordinary circumstances is there in the phantasmagoric quality of the fiction. If his books are about anything, they’re about willed alienation, about the inward freedom of prayer and meditation. ’’To cope in the old Soviet times many people lived in this state of inner exile,’’ he explains, ’’particularly if they didn’t want to be dissidents and go to prison. They took jobs as, say, janitors and had all the official papers. So they acted in the world, but it was all a pretense. They really lived in a world inside their own heads.’’ If the outer turmoil reaches such a level, he says, ’’where else can one go?’’
As for Victor Pelevin, his own journey appears scarcely to have begun. The writing life stretches before him like a turbulent ocean of discovery, and, like Gogol, whom he sometimes recalls, he is enraptured by the fantastic nature of Russian reality. Unlike his fellow novelists, he will never be content merely to linger on the past, so rich is the fictional potential of the society in which he finds himself. That is, unless he decides to follow the path of Solzhenitsyn, Nabokov and Brodsky into becoming a writer in exile. ’’My dream,’’ he says, ’’is always to be on the move. If I had enough money that’s how I would live. I would leave Russia and simply keep traveling, keep moving on, never settling anywhere for long. I hate being connected to one place; it blisters the mind.’’
Yet as Pelevin well knows, Russia is both the inspiration for, and engine of, his fiction; she is his tarnished muse. In permanent exile, you suspect, Pelevin would wither into aimlessness as a writer and begin drifting, like a buoy without its moorings. No, far better to stay, to continue holding up a mirror to a sick society, even if he sometimes dislikes the portrait staring back at him in the glazed mirror of his prose.
Источник — http://www.nytimes.com/2000/01/23/magazine/gogol-a-go-go.html
«Я
Виктор Пелевин, 1962 года рождения, является автором нашумевших повестей и романов, таких как «Омон Ра», «Жизнь насекомых», «Чапаев и Пустота». Его последняя вещь, «Generation П», в прошлом году разошлась тиражом более 200 000 экземпляров. Среди нынешнего поколения постсоветских читателей именно он, будучи серьезным писателем, вызывает как наибольший интерес, так и ожесточенную критику.