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
Weekly noted, 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 Spin called a master
absurdist, a brilliant satirist of things Soviet, but also of things
human--carries us in A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia to a land of
great sublimity and black comic brilliance.
