Text: Varvara Babitskaya
The heroes of Pelevin's new novel are from the nineties. This is the oligarch Fedor, a loser who got rich not thanks to intelligence, hard work or gangster prowess, but because of random luck, and his school love is the beautiful Tanya, the second loser who did not succeed in the career of a gangster kept woman, grew fat and consoles herself with women's novels and popular psychology … New times did not bring them any meaning in life, except for power, converted into money and sex, and they could not bring them - we are all in slavery to the narratives imposed on us in order to make us consume more and more: reflections with a chimera ".
Each of the heroes meets their own imp, offering a shortcut to happiness. Damian, a startup from Skolkovo, opens up a new sphere of consumption - spiritual for the oligarch, fed up with sex, drugs and modern art. With the help of high technologies, Fyodor's brain is connected directly to the brain of a Burmese monk, allowing him to take advantage of someone else's enlightenment without long meditations - to achieve “jan”, that is, special states of high concentration in which a person is invulnerable to sorrows. At first it really brings incomparable bliss, but you can't hack Buddha: Fyodor, who would be happy to go to paradise, but would not allow sins, breaks down from the heights of enlightenment into a terrible depression.
Desperate and embittered by the whole race, male Tanya meets Giselle, a transgender woman "with four eggs", who draws the heroine into a sect of fighting feminists - "Huntresses" - and gives her power over the patriarchal world.
Happiness turns out to be a fiction - and what is happiness? The heroes do not suffer from some unmet needs and unfulfilled desires - they yearn for the times when they had desires, as in the Soviet joke about the goldfish: "I want everything to be there!" - “Okay, man, do it your way! You had everything. " In this, all the heroes of the novel are in solidarity, who find themselves dangerously close to painful enlightenment at a single memory of childhood, caused by the "trembling Soviet voice" on YouTube: "Only that everything will pass, there is no need to remember." This nostalgic voice periodically breaks through in the novel and without any mockery: “… as she vaguely felt, in old Russia - even in Soviet Russia - it was possible to try to pity a murderer or a thief, reminding him of the cross on his chest. Well, we will remove this cross, for example. And then what will we remind the tormentor about? About liberal values?"
Pelevin, of course, mocks
feminists, but he also mocks anti-feminists. According to the Dovlatov principle: "After the communists, I hate anti-communists most of all."
By the way, about values. The Secret Views of Mount Fuji was rumored to be an apology for misogyny and an anti-feminist pamphlet. But this is not the case. Pelevin does not choose a special target - he is simply true to himself: "he did not want to bless anyone in all nature", distributing click-throughs to SS psychoanalysts who manipulate a person, forcing him to "talk a piece of gold for the very first session" to literary critics and startups …
The novel is arranged like this: a monologue that everything looks like a joke about Harvey Weinstein. A gentle bow to the Russian philosopher Alexander Pyatigorsky - a joke about Nastya Rybka. The argument that everything is vanity is a joke about #MeToo. In the first chapter about Tanya, one can even hear pity for the "woman's lot", and about the #MeToo movement, a respectful note by the author's standards is given: "the mainstream American movement for the dignity and inviolability of women, accompanied by individual excesses on the ground." Pelevin is not the philosopher Pyatigorsky. He is a fiction writer and rightly believes that he will not be able to captivate readers with lecture notes on Buddhology, therefore, condescending to our infirmity, he spices up the eternal spite of the day, which he finds on Facebook. Feminism and sexual violence are on the agenda this year - well, you will have all the relevant cliches and memasics.
The problem for him is not feminists, but that venality turns "any cultural initiative of the elite into a disgusting parody that is forbidden to laugh at." Pelevin, of course, mocks feminists, but he also mocks anti-feminists. According to the Dovlatov principle: "After the communists, I hate anti-communists most of all."
As a representative of the feminist regional committee, I have no questions for the book, there is another, sad one: if a person knows so much about enlightenment, why does he read so much Facebook?
I can't say whether in the reserved Dovlatov times the killer could have been ashamed with a cross on his chest, but for a laugh, the era of legalized bilingualism, the decaying rhetoric of stagnation was, without a doubt, fertile. However, laughter is a volatile substance, it changes with time. A joke is ridiculous when there is an obvious cliche that it travesty. In Russia now it is not just bilingualism, but two parallel norms: one for “liberals on Facebook”, and the other for people who are far from femme enlightenment. The image of the #MeToo movement as an all-powerful regional committee, which can seriously forbid someone to laugh, is a cliche in itself - morality and handshake have nothing to do with it. Although jokes about the unfortunate Nastya Rybka do not do any special honor to a person who is no stranger to "compassion and love for all living things."
Pelevin's new novel was named after Kobayashi Issa's classic hockey:
Quiet, quietly crawl
Snail, on the Fuji slope
Up to the heights!
As the Japaneseists write, this poem is a joke: the poet does not mean a real sacred mountain, but its model, installed in the courtyard of a Buddhist temple. If the startup Damian really learned the secret of happiness, he would not sell it to the oligarchs, but would sit in the lotus position day-and-day. As a representative of the feminist regional committee, I have no questions for the book, there is another, sad one: if a person knows so much about enlightenment, why does he read so much Facebook? His Buddhist preaching is somehow not credible.