Victor Pelevin

Victor Pelevin (born Moscow, 1962) is a Russian writer whose fiction sits somewhere between science fiction, political satire and postmodernism. He began publishing in the last years of the Soviet Union and became one of the most widely read voices in Russia after 1991, combining pop culture, Buddhism and esoteric philosophy.

He trained as an electromechanical engineer at the Moscow Power Engineering Institute and worked as an engineer before turning fully to writing. In 1989 he attended the creative writing seminar of Mikhail Lobanov at the Maxim Gorky Literary Institute, and that same year his first short story, The Sorcerer Ignat and People, appeared in print. His stories then came out in magazines and anthologies, and his collection The Blue Lantern brought him a Russian literary prize. His first widely noticed novel, Omon Ra, a satire on the Soviet space programme, made him famous almost overnight in the early 1990s.

His novels blend genres that rarely meet: adventure, parable, short anecdote, utopia and parody. His prose is dense with allusions, hidden quotations and irony, and it places Zen Buddhism, occultism and European philosophy beside the imagery of mass culture. Pelevin uses postmodern techniques in the service of a humanist outlook, and in later books he criticises the very lack of grand narratives that postmodernism embraced.

Generation P (1999) satirises advertising and consumer culture in 1990s Russia and became one of his best-selling books. Empire V (2006) pursued a similar satire of power and the media. Pelevin avoids interviews and public appearances; when he does speak, he prefers to discuss the nature of the mind rather than his own work, which has fuelled rumours about who he really is. In the past decade he has published roughly one book a year.

His books have been translated into many languages, including Japanese and Chinese. In 2009 a French magazine named him among the one thousand most significant figures in contemporary culture, and in 2011 he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He is regarded as one of the most influential writers in contemporary Russian literature.