A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia and Other Stories [Paperback]

Victor Pelevin (Author), Andrew Bromfield (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0811215431 | ISBN-13: 978-0811215435 | Publication Date: May 2003

Stories by the renowned Russian wizard. 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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Russian writers tend to gravitate toward either Tolstoyan gravity or Gogol's brand of feather-light fabulism. Victor Pelevin, the author of four previous books, most definitely belongs in the latter camp. His work may be grounded in the grubby realities of contemporary Russia, but the food shortages, decaying apartment blocks, and political chaos serve him as a kind of naturalistic springboard from which he launches into one antic leap after another. Pelevin's latest collection is a case in point. The title story finds a young, Moscow-based slacker visiting the countryside, hoping for a little bucolic enlightenment. Instead, he stumbles across a pack of werewolves deep in the forest, who hastily induct him into their numbers. Pelevin expertly conveys Sasha's brand-new lupine perceptions: the way he can now "distinguish the creaking of a branch in the wind a hundred yards from the clearing and the chirping of a cricket coming from precisely the opposite direction." But as the pack heads into a nearby village, it becomes clear that Sasha has been chosen to purge a treacherous, four-legged comrade. Perestroika notwithstanding, man is still a wolf to man--and vice versa.

Elsewhere, in "Sleep," a student discovers that the rest of the world is in a state of slumber, and promptly gets with the program himself. "It was all very confusing, and in order to be able to tell whether he was asleep or not at any particular moment, Nikita began carrying a small pin with a big, round, green head in his pocket, and whenever he was in any doubt, he pricked his thigh, and everything became clear. Then, of course, there was the new fear that he might simply dream that he was pricking himself with the pin, but Nikita drove that thought from his mind as quite unbearable." Political allegory? Existential parable? Arguably these stories are both--but Pelevin's talent is much too large and unpredictable to be jammed into such generic pigeonholes. He's a brilliant original who seems to get better (and funnier) with each book. --James Marcus --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Originally published in 1994, Pelevin's second Booker Prize-winning short fiction collection brilliantly and poignantly satirizes the economic, cultural and spiritual decay of Mother Russia under Communism. Kafka, one of Pelevin's more obvious literary ancestors, described his own enigmatic black fantasies as "parables," and so are Pelevin's: almost fable-simple on the surface with strange subterranean currents contorting their helpless protagonists into caricatures and corpses. These eight parables each close on a lesson illustrating the absurdity of life in the U.S.S.R. "Sleep" opens at a Marxist-Leninist university lecture, where Nikita Dozakin discovers that everyone, including his droning professor, has learned to avoid all unpleasantness-daily living-by functioning in their sleep. In "Tai Shou Chuan," Comrade Chan, whisked mysteriously to Moscow, rises to rule the entire country, but is dumped for telling the truth; power, in the eyes of the wise, he learns, is no different from an anthill. "The Ontology of Childhood," like the title story and "Vera Pavlovna's Ninth Dream," reveals the bitter pain of every stage of life under the Soviets: adults make children "feel rotten because they want you to become just like them"-depressed, drunken, angry, isolated, less than human. The few feeble flashes of compassion and joy in Pelevin's bleak landscape are achieved only by sleep, alcohol, drugs or changing into something other than a citizen of a land where "you were born and grew up in a prison," subject to inhuman laws a Big Brother made and enforces, which you blindly endure with "the calm enduring hatred known only to Siamese cats with cruel masters, and Soviet engineers who read George Orwell."
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation (May 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811215431
• ISBN-13: 978-0811215435
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.3 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.5 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #900,204 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Sublime and The Ridiculous, November 12, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia: And Other Stories (Hardcover)

A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia, a collection of short stories, exhibits both the joys and the challenges of reading someone as brilliantly absurd as Russia's Victor Pelevin. The tamest of these eight stories is surreal, the most complex is, at times, simply impenetrable. At times, Pelevin addresses universal themes with tremendous insight; at other times his satire is so specifically Russian that anyone not well-versed in Russian history will find the subject matter less than understandable. And, although Pelevin appears to be striving for a light mood, at least in some of the stories, the gloomy and pessimistic specter of the former Soviet Union casts its shadow over the volume as a whole.

A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia can be seen as both a tribute to Dostoyevsky and as a radical departure from him, for these characters are loners who are simply not aware that they are loners. The Tarzan Swing is a Pelevin story that is very reminiscent of Dostoyevsky's story, The Double. It comes as a shock to the protagonist of Tarzan's Swing to realize that he is carrying on a conversation with a companion that might be nothing more than his shadow. Unlike The Double, however, the protagonist in Pelevin's story is never really sure if this "companion" is real or not.

All of Pelevin's rather narcissistic characters wander through their post-perestroika days in a dreamlike state obsessing on the meaning of life. They exist outside of themselves and seem to take it in stride that the physical world is compromised by spatial and temporal impossibilities, that a universe exists in a teapot, that dream landscapes are superimposed on real ones and that Russia is but a sewer cover away from China. And, while Dostoyevsky's characters are bogged down by paranoid delusions, Pelevin's characters always seem to find themselves faced with the empty but ultimately self-satisfying prospect of solipsism, and they take it for granted that the world is in a kind of surreal flux.

The title story tells the tale of a traveler who becomes hopelessly lost in central Russia and is transformed into a werewolf. Surprisingly, he likes it and he finds it a very liberating experience. This story, told in a linear manner, is no doubt the most accessible of the entire volume. Pelevin gives us stunning detail so we are able to feel how the character moves and smells and sees. The story's placement at the beginning of the collection provides the perfect entree to the lunacy that is Victor Pelevin's trademark.

The Ontology of Childhood is more difficult to grasp, especially for those not familiar with Russian history or Russian literature, but it is a more accomplished piece of writing and showcases Pelevin's unique talent most admirably. Written in the second person, The Ontology of Childhood is a chilling recollection of growing up in a prison and blends powerful remembrances of dark pessimism with expressions of profound hope.

Pelevin's uncanny ability to render eerie, off-center dreamscapes makes him the Salvador Dali of literature. He is a wordsmith who successfully mixes the sublime with the ridiculous and comes up with wildly turbulent tales that are always more than interesting and thought provoking. They are, in their essence, nothing short of great literature.

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Two amazing stories, and some other good ones., January 20, 1999

By 

Russell Pittman "aging literary economist" (Takoma Park, MD USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia: And Other Stories (Hardcover)

The first and last stories in this collection, "A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia" and "Prince of Gosplan", are quite remarkable, and certainly worth the price of admission. The former is a wonderfully lyrical story about a traveller who chances on a group of people who are able to turn themselves into werewolves at will. The latter is an absurdist tour de force about a programmer of video games whose life is lived largely in the games. I think both are safely characterized as unforgettable. The shorter other stories have some excellent moments -- especially "Tai Shou Chuan USSR", about a Chinese peasant who accidentally becomes an important Soviet government official, and "The Ontology of Childhood" -- but seem somewhat less comprehensible.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This is officially one of my favorite short story collections ever!, December 26, 2005

By 

CoffeeGurl - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia and Other Stories (Paperback)

This is one of the darkest, most surreal short story collections I have ever read. Russian literature has always struck me as being intense, brutal and, yes, depressing at times, and this book contains more of the two former than the latter descriptions. I will also add "surreal" into the mix. A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia and Other Stories is a book that won't be forgotten any time soon and that has won a special spot in my library. The stories in this collection are quite intricate -- with a language that changes from being surrealistic to having fantasy aspects to centering on social situations. They are intellectually and emotionally exhausting, and they disturbed as well as moved me at times. My favorite stories are "The Ontology of Childhood," "Sleep," "The Tarzan Swing," "A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia," and "Prince of Gosplan." This is the English translation of the original Russian offering, and I only hope that there was nothing lost in the translation because I love to read the author's words and interpretations on the pages. Are you in the bargain for some intense and enlightening stories? I suggest you give A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia a whirl. You will not regret it!