Viktor Pelevin

Viktor Pelevin is undoubtedly the best known fiction writer to have emerged in Russian literature since the fall of the Communism. In a series of novels and short stories published in the 1990s he captured the zeitgeist with his exuberant satire of Soviet and post-Soviet society. His works are couched in the trendy language of Western postmodernism, science fiction, as well as pop-Buddhism, Eastern mysticism, Japanese Manga comics and ironic-nostalgic Socialist Realist parody, but consciously in the tradition of Nikolai Gogol and the 1920s avant-garde. At the same time, the publication history and reception of his work to date (August 2005) epitomises the shift in Russian literary culture from a journal- and critic-led process