2022-11-25 00:01:29
The author of Generation P is 60. This figure, of course, is not as shocking as the recent 40th anniversary of Macaulay Culkin from Home Alone or the 50th anniversary of the forever fragile Tatyana Bulanova. And yet it scratches unpleasantly. One of the brightest characters of Russian culture at the turn of the millennium will soon be in his seventies. And this once again reminds us how quickly time flies and how rapidly that era is moving away from us. The anniversary film, however, turned out not only about perestroika and the 1990s, but also quite about today. Pelevinsky Macabre is aging much more slowly than we would like. And how Pelevin himself is aging.
Still from the movie trailer /KION
Rodion Chepel, co-founder of the Amur Waves company, has already filmed about Vlad Listyev, and about Pavel Durov, and his Pelevin – certainly not a ritual offering on the day of the anniversary. The film is distinguished from ordinary TV documentaries dedicated to the anniversary of some classic not only by the film language, although even here there is a huge distance (however, it is difficult to shoot something completely traditional about the recluse and the original Pelevin with all the desire). It’s nice to have a goal. There are no cheap revelations or on-duty praise, and there is no fan admiration. And there is an understandable human curiosity. An ordinary guy from Chertanovo Severny – and that’s it. Guru.
Whoever is an experienced Pelevin fan will probably not learn anything fundamentally new. Csepel adds little compared to what has already been said in the book “Pelevin and the Generation of Void” (2012) by Sergei Polotovsky and Roman Kozak, as well as in the film essay “Writer P. Generation of Void” (2013) by Boris Karadzhev and Grigory Ryabushev. Unless he shows exclusive photos from the writer’s Chinese trip in the early 2000s. Comrades on the tour made them without permission, but respectfully – Pelevin here is quite similar to himself. Gloomy, mysterious, in black glasses. Then he will finally go off the radar even for friends.
This movie is good because it is not for fans, but for everyone. It’s just plain fun to watch. Even for those who have not read the author, but want to have an opinion. Or just interested in recent history. Pelevin’s early biography is quite typical of the collapse of the empire. A techie by education, he goes into literature and even enters the Literary Institute – even if he does not study there for long. Such a turn is extremely typical. Perestroika literature is fashionable, it is money. Two factors, the abolition of censorship and the permission of private cooperatives, predetermined the book avalanche of the late 1980s. Before his literary fame, Pelevin worked at a publishing house for a while and edited the Russian translation of Carlos Castaneda.
New age fashion is again a sign of the times. What was the property of small circles in the 1970s is now of interest to the broad masses of the people. However, Pelevin managed to join the secret knowledge a little earlier and even wandered through the nooks and crannies of the esoteric underground. I also looked into the Yuzhinsky circle, where both Yuri Mamleev and Alexander Dugin come from. This is how Pelevin developed the practice of seeing secret mechanisms hidden under the veil of everyday life. A huge array of information ranging from Buddhist teachings to the ethnography of African tribes is assimilated at the same time and provokes the wildest analogies.
Still from the movie trailer /KION
However, there were many esotericists, and Pelevin alone. Because he effectively took advantage of the opportunities provided. Of course, unconditional literary talent helped. Plus – an amazing combination of seriousness with “fig in your pocket.” It is never clear whether he believes in his designs or just joking. Finally, amazing business sense. Pelevin predicts trends, communicates correctly with the audience and publishers. And he even disappeared just in time – on the eve of the era of smartphones and social networks, when disappearance becomes something impossible.
Among other things, we are convincingly explained why the late Pelevin writes worse than the early one. Oddly enough, because of the same seclusion. Those whom we see in the frame – friends of childhood and youth, travel buddies, even the first editor of Vogue magazine Alyona Doletskaya, who once interviewed Pelevin and gave him sake to drink – they all became heroes of books. Fantastic stories are based on personal communication with very real people. Some stories, like the fly agaric trip from Generation P, actually happened to the author. But since the early 2000s, Pelevin has radically reduced communication. And living characters naturally disappeared from the pages.
In total, Chepel talked with a dozen people – not only with Pelevin’s witnesses, but, for example, with critic Galina Yuzefovich, who is writing a book about the writer. However, the investigative documentary filmmaker himself is a completely legitimate hero of the film. There are a lot of chapels in the frame – and in the literal sense. In some scenes it is two or three or five or six. A graduate of the school of Leonid Parfyonov, he goes further than a teacher – he almost acts, playing out lines and situations for Pelevin himself. He, of course, will also appear. Not only in the form of rare photos and videos, but also as a cartoon character. The film has a lot of very different and beautiful animation by the Zhi-shi production studio, from three-dimensional to anime.
A new interview with Pelevin, of course, could not be taken. And fearless. Judging by the stories, the most interesting thing about his personality is his books. Outside of books there is no Pelevin either.
#Pelevin #boy