A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia

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.

“"Pelevin has emerged as that unusual thing: a genuinely popular serious writer. (The New York Times)Antic and allegorical, these tales chronicle the absurdities of post-Soviet, postmodern Russia. (New York Times Book Review)Brilliantly and poignantly satirizes the economic, cultural and spiritual decay of Mother Russia under Communism. (Publishers Weekly)These are the kind of stories you just delight in reading and re-reading. (NPR, Morning Edition, Nancy Pearl)These short stories are so irretrievably weird that they glow like the bears must glow in the woods around Chernobyl. (Bruce Sterling, The Week)"”

"Pelevin has emerged as that unusual thing: a genuinely popular serious writer. (The New York Times) Antic and allegorical, these tales chronicle the absurdities of post-Soviet, postmodern Russia. (New York Times Book Review) Brilliantly and poignantly satirizes the economic, cultural and spiritual decay of Mother Russia under Communism. (Publishers Weekly) These are the kind of stories you just delight in reading and re-reading. (NPR, Morning Edition, Nancy Pearl) These short stories are so irretrievably weird that they glow like the bears must glow in the woods around Chernobyl. (Bruce Sterling, The Week)"

Victor Pelevin is one of Russia's most successful post-Soviet writers. He won the Russian Booker prize in 1993 Born on November 22, 1962 in Moscow, he attended the Moscow Institute of Power Engineering, and the Institute of Literature. He's now been published throughout Europe. His books include A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia, Omon Ra, The Blue Lantern, The Yellow Arrow, and The Hall of the Singing Caryatids. Born in Yorkshire, England, Andrew Bromfield is a translator of Russian literature and an editor and co-founder of the literary journal Glas.

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