Writer and emptiness – Newspaper Kommersant No. 219 (7420) of 11/25/2022

A documentary film “Pelevin” was released on the KION platform, conceived by its author Rodion Chepel as a gift for the sixtieth anniversary of the most phantom and most hyped, the most fascinating and most boring Russian writer of the last thirty-odd years. Mikhail Trofimenkov against his will, he became interested in solving the riddle “Was there a boy?”.

Rodion Chepel on the screen either splits in two, then splits up, then in general, Lord have mercy, splits ten. He sprinkles quotes from a few interviews with Viktor Olegovich Pelevin – he is also an air defense (in honor of his father, who once covered the sky of Iraq from imperialist predators). He tears his hero’s books to shreds and runs away from a giant scarab in the Bitsevsky forest. In general, he behaves in much the same way as Konstantin Ernst behaved in the legendary “Matadors” of perestroika television (by the way, flashing in the frame for a moment), climbing into the shoes of either Fassbinder or Coppola.

But, unlike the classics of world cinema, it is almost impossible to climb into the shoes of air defense, which has fallen out of public space for twenty years and – a man of flesh and blood – never appears on the screen. One can only pour words about him, in which the critic Galina Yuzefovich succeeds most of all, placing air defense in the social context of perestroika and everything that followed it with strict teacher intonations.

The problem is that air defense escapes from any context. No biographical details add anything to his absence/presence in Russian literature. Did he study at MPEI, did he work in the trolleybus depot, “watered the cat and guarded the plants” in the apartment of his classmate Sergei Moskalev? Did he play with fly agarics, a dangerous razor, or consume sake in industrial quantities in the company of journalists Alena Doletskaya and Karina Dobrotvorskaya? Was he friends with Igor Chechetkin, a veteran of the special services, on a trip to China, in order to venomously deduce him under a pseudonym in one of the novels? Doesn’t matter anyway.

What’s wrong with him now? Died and replaced by a gang of literary “blacks”? Did you go to the ashram? Drinking tea in Abramtsevo? Who cares, PVO is no longer a writer and not even a socio-psychological barometer, not a prophet who predicted a war with Urkaina six years ago, and not a mystic involved in the gloomy “Yuzhinsky circle” of Yuri Mamleev’s followers.

At best, he is a slave to his freedom, which he chose, having retired from the world, but not from record circulations and royalties, cutting off all digital traces leading to him. Is it easy for him, is it hard to live like this? And what do we care. We, his first readers, have enough of the stunning memories of “The Life of Insects” and “Chapaev and the Void”, which appeared – it’s hard to believe now – on the pages of solid thick magazines.

In the worst case, air defense, which Chapel perfectly guessed, has long been a cartoon character of its own digital universe. It is no coincidence that animated inserts are perhaps the best thing in Pelevin. And the one where, by inserting a magic battery into the belly of a trolleybus, a young engineer turns a dull public transport vehicle into a green monster, marching like your Godzilla along Moscow boulevards. And the one where the air defense, according to the recollections of friends, is a master karateka, jumps and flies over the piano, which is played by a chants girl. And the one where he descends from the plane on a fly agaric parachute.

In a cartoon-digital and in its own way conspiracy universe, everything is possible. Therefore, a specific tension arises when you peer into the faces of witnesses who once knew the air defense closely and very closely, but, according to them, have not met with it for a long time. This is his childhood friend Yevgeny Petrenko, who seems to have inspired the air defense for literary experiments. This is the same Moskalev, whose handmade cactus peyote air defense once tried to eat, but never did. And, finally, a classmate of the air defense at the Literary Institute, from where Pelevin was expelled “for losing contact” with his alma mater, Victor Kulle.

Petrenko, take off your glasses! Moskalev, what would you look like if you were not an interesting gray-haired IT specialist, but a brunette, like air defense in his last photos of twenty years ago? Yes, even Kulle: it was not by chance that you were suspected of, to put it mildly, co-authorship with air defense?

Any of them seems to be disguised as air defense. Paranoia? But how! But after all, the universe of air defense is the universe of paranoia: social, political, historiosophical. It’s time to shout “guard”: Pelevin can be any of them and any of us.

In addition to these close air defense people, no less interesting characters flicker on the margins of the film, at different times in one way or another in contact with the hero. For example, Heydar Dzhemal or Sergey Kiriyenko. Just mentioning them is enough to launch another round of paranoid conspiracy theories. But it’s better to just summarize. What a blessing that the air defense chose a literary, and not a political technology path. Otherwise, few in the world would not have seemed to anyone.