The Eastern Voyd

Victor Pelevin’s Petr Voyd is a fascinating incarnation of a well established Russian literary hero: Not unlike Bulgakov’s Master, he is trapped between institutional and historical madness. Not unlike Dostoevskian Karamazovs he scrambles to identify his place in an incomprehensible universe that bombards him and his fellow-characters with never ending philosophical conundrums. He weighs, like Tolstoy’s Levin (or better even: like Tolstoy himself) the merits of Eastern vs. Western spiritual philosophy. Like Gogol’s lunatics he is slipping into dreamy absurdity. Throw in some blow from the “Novel with Cocaine”, the spiritual perversion of Blok’s tragic “12”, stir with a good helping of Mahayana Buddhism of the Gelugpa leaning and you get this punk tale of a man who coexists on (at least) two planes of consciousness: as an inmate in a lunatic asylum in present day Russia and as a commissar working for Furmanov’s (and history’s) Soviet Überhero Chapaev.

Chapaev i Pustota is a smart read that pulls few punches in its frantic pursuit of Eastern Enlightenment: it fearlessly throws overboard the likes of Christianity, Western reason, most of psychiatry, physics and a few other disciplines of thought. Yet it never really leaves the fold of the Russian novelist tradition, which has grappled with similar issues as deeply, if less aggressively, for centuries. The most obvious indicator for Pelevin’s traditional approach is perhaps his treatment of women, or rather the lack thereof. The novel is a thoroughly male undertaking. The one truly female character in this book is a glorious caricature of all the haughty, unattainable, beautiful femmes fatales which we know from the canon: Pelevin’s Anna (there is oh so much in the choice of that name) wears the black velvet gowns of her 19th century namesake Karenina; she has the cold aloofness of Turgenev’s Odintseva and even resembles the grand dame of Russian literature herself: Akhmatova. Yes, Pelevin looted his heritage for this novel and mixed us a potent speedball of a read in his cheeky tale of Russian questions and fallacies. Many issues are raised, intelligently, sarcastically, ironically, bitterly even, and in true Russian keeping the spiritual resolution which Voyd is allowed to find as the Raskolnikovs and Levins were before him, remains exclusively male – as is the history, the tradition, the hero, and the image of the woman that we are offered. In short: while the relentless pursuit of Buddhist ideals, rather than Christian salvation is new (at least to me), the ingredients, with which Pelevin works, are well known.

Regardless of the traditional leanings, it is the literary goal that makes this book ultimately successful. Its sole purpose is to chronicle the immense difficulty of mastering the central Buddhist idea that the past and the future do not exist and that all we can transcend is the here and now. The possibilities that open up once this deceivingly obvious hurdle is overcome by the mind is what Pelevin illustrates with irreverent Russian verve: that which we perceive as reality merges with that which we classify as dreams. They become equally relevant planes of consciousness that intersect and coexist outside of time. It is, therefore, Pelevin’s play on time that is the most elegant feat of his book: mind transcends time, knows the Buddhist, and hence what happens in Russia now is not at all removed from what the country experienced in another turbulent period – the revolutionary mayhem and the civil war.

The idea of an “alchemical wedlock with Asia” is carefully combined with the traditional affiliation Russia has with Buddhism: the book is steeped in Tibetan Buddhist imagery. Pelevin traces the heritage from the two Christian capitals to the Mongolian steppes from whence it came with the Golden Hordes. The Mongolian Khanate followed Mahayana Buddhism and the powerful Tibetan Gelugpas (yellow hats) long functioned as the spiritual advisors of the Empire.
No wonder then that Voyd reappears from an exploration of the infinite plane of consciousness in the here and now wearing a yellow hat in what is undoubtedly the high point of the entire novel. It is here that Pelevin manages to convey to his reader an inkling of what it may be like to step out of one’s temporal and spatial perception, accept the inherent non-existence of it all and move freely in the state of mind. This freedom can only be obtained if Russia embraces its Asian (read: Buddhist) heritage, which the majority of the culture has resisted so stubbornly since the battle of Kulikovo.

Considering the tremendous influence the Mongol occupation had on the Russian heritage Pelevin’s wedlock seems not too far-fetched. Of course, he is not the first to suggest this (Khlebnikov, for example, spoke of an “Azosoiuz” in his day), but I have never seen the idea executed so rigorously in Russian fiction before.