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A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia and Other Stories
Victor Pelevin
"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. " Amazon.cm
New Directions Publishing Corporation
May 2003
224 pages
ISBN: 0811215431
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Contemporary
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.
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