"Chapaev and the Void" is the third novel of the famous Russian writer Viktor Olegovich Pelevin. It was written in 1996 and became a cult work of the author, along with such novels as "Omon Ra" and "Life of Insects". As a printed publication was published in the largest publishing houses of the country - AST, Eksmo, Vagrius, later the work was voiced and published as an audio book.
In the article you will find a summary of Victor Pelevin's Chapaev and Void, a story about the heroes of the novel, and a review of reader reviews.
About the novel
This work, according to critics, can be considered as an example of a work of postmodern aesthetics. The space of the novel is filled with traits of chaos and limitless multidimensionality, as well as the inability to know this world.
As you know, Pelevin attributed his texts to turborealism. The works, which are written in the style of this philosophical, psychological and intellectual prose, combine âordinaryâ literature and fiction. In fact, this is the continuation and development of the very "realistic fiction" that the Strugatsky brothers wrote. The starting point of the plot events here are often fantastic assumptions, while the entire text is usually written in compliance with the canons of socio-psychological prose.
As the reader can understand from Victor Pelevinâs book âChapaev and the Voidâ, the modern world is a kind of symbiosis of Eastern philosophical ideas, computer technology, music and examples of technogenic thinking. All this is shrouded in an alcoholic cloud and seasoned with "dope", which usually means drugs and even poisonous mushrooms. All this could not but split the consciousness of the hero of the work, who, with all this, continues to think about the eternal questions of being.
Cover comment:
This is the first novel in world literature, which takes place in an absolute void.
- as if affirms the impossibility of any true teaching. For, according to Victor Pelevin,
there is only one freedom when you are free from everything that the mind builds. This freedom is called "I do not know."
The novel is built in the form of a chain of âfalse storiesâ looped around the main plot - the main characterâs insight with Chapaevâs truth of human existence and enlightenment (satori).
About the plot
The novel tells about events that occur in two historical periods - the Civil War (1918) and the time of the 1990s, more precisely, their middle. The narration is conducted on behalf of the decadent poet Peter Pustota, who, by the will of the author, exists simultaneously in both time spaces.
Having met in the revolutionary Petrograd with the legendary divisional commander Vasily Chapaev, Emptiness goes with him to the front to become a commissar. However, in reality (and this is precisely the 90s), Peter is being treated in a psychiatric clinic and undergoes an experimental treatment course under the supervision of Professor Kanashnikov.
The professor explains the main character that has just arrived to the essence of his method: to cure each of the four inhabitants of the chamber, it is necessary to become participants in events taking place in the inner world - but not his own - but his neighbor. Immersion in someone else's reality is the key to the recovery of all four - Kanashnikov calls this technique "joint hallucinatory experience."
In fact, the critic and writer Dmitry Bykov spoke quite succinctly about the plot of the novel:
The plot in the usual sense of the novel does not and cannot be. In a psychiatric hospital, the madman Peter Pustota languishes, imagining himself a decadent poet of the beginning of the century. This âfalse personalityâ dominates his mind. Pyotr Pustota lives in 1919, meets Chapaev, who looks like a guru to Pelevin, a teacher of spiritual liberation, falls in love with Anka, masters a cart (touch Anka, he deciphers his name for himself), almost dies in a fight at Lozovaya station (where By the way, his nuthouse is also located), and simultaneously listens to the delusions of his comrades in the ward.
Characters
First of all, we will name the professor of the psychiatric hospital Timur Timurovich Kanashnikov, as well as the four patients gathered in the ward. In addition to the mentioned Peter Nether, the protagonist of the novel, this is Serdyuk, then a character acting under the name Just Maria and the bandit - the new Russian Vladimir Volodin, who ended up in the clinic thanks to his accomplice.
The novel involves a lot of secondary, but important for the story characters, which will be described below.
Peter Void
This is the name of the main character of the work - the poet, the young commissar and schizophrenic. The sick psyche and numerous philosophical works read by the hero completely perverted Peter's adequate view of the world around him and accelerated the process of personality split. He either imagines himself a decadent poet of the era of burgeoning symbolism, or a machine gunner, who, together with Anka, militarily burns clay from the cannon through the universe. The latter is understood in the novel as emptiness and becomes the key concept of the novel, and not just the strange surname of Peter.
Falling asleep in the division at Chapaev, the hero wakes up in a madhouse. He is convinced that the hospital ward and hospital is only his fantasy, and the world of the Civil War is real. But Chapaev assures him that both worlds are equally ghostly and Peter's task is to wake up. The problem seems unsolvable, because everywhere around the hero there is only one void:
- Everything that we see is in our consciousness, Petka. Therefore, it is impossible to say that our consciousness is somewhere. We are nowhere simply because there is no place about which we could say that we are in it. That's why we are nowhere.
Semyon Serdyuk
This patient, personifying the intellectual drunken layer of society, sees himself in a different reality as a warrior, drawn into the rivalry of two influential clans, Tyra and Minamoto, which took place in Japan of the 12th century. During the events, Serdyuk, following the Japanese ideals of faithful service and duty, will try to commit suicide by the ritual suicide of the samurai - hara-kiri.
Serdyukâs craving for a Japanese man named Kawabata, who either recruits him to work in a modern company, or devotes himself to the ancient Taira family in samurai, persuading in the end the necessity of suicide, once again points to one of the ideas of Pelevin's prose about the alchemical union of Russia with Eastern and Western worlds.
In addition, Kawabata-san is an explicit reference to the famous Japanese writer, Nobel Prize in Literature for 1968, officer of the French Order of Literature and Art Yasunari Kawabate. His close friend was Yukio Mishima, who, after a failed coup attempt in 1970, took a desperate step and committed suicide through hara-kiri. Kawabatu, and, of course, not only him, was shocked by this death.
Simply Maria
18-year-old boy Maria, such an unusual name given to him by his parents who are passionate about reading Remarque, suggests calling himself Just Maria. He adores the cinematic image of Arnold Schwarzenegger and is sure that he is in love with this character. The reason for her forced stay in the clinic is simply that Maria considers a sudden blow to the Ostankino TV tower. In this image, Pelevin parodically comprehended the image of a generation infected with endless and thoughtless absorption in abundance of then-appearing Mexican âsoap operasâ and Hollywood fighters.
The name of the young man is an unconditional allusion to the steady erasure of gender differences, as well as, possibly, same-sex love. However, Maria is recovering first and leaving the clinic first, which, according to reviews of Chapaev and Void, may well indicate the authorâs likely hope for an early moral healing of youth.
And the rest
For the average reader, that is, for you and me, the historical past is most often just a set of stamps, established pictures and will be accepted. In this novel, Pelevin brings a lot of this traditional set to a parody and robs the halo of greatness. These are the revolutionary sailors drinking âBaltic teaâ (vodka with cocaine mixed in it); and "enlightened by Inner Mongolia", presented as the bodhisattva Chapai, drinking moonshine in glasses; and marasmatic Ilyich; and Anka Chapaevâs niece - an emancipated beauty and decadent, flaunting in a velvet evening dress. By the way, Chapaev himself is also dressed not in a commissar:
the door opened and I saw Chapaev. He was wearing a black velvet jacket, a white shirt and a scarlet butterfly from the same iridescent moire ...
Not the last role is assigned to Kotovsky, who acts as a "demiurge." And although Pustota himself in the novel speaks of Kotovskyâs addiction to cocaine, it is this character, according to the general mythological settings of the work, that is responsible for the fate of all of Russia, as well as for its future.
In the parody of Pelevinâs novel âChapaev and the Voidâ, even the Nietzschean superman is personified, one of the patients of the hospital personified by the new Russian Volodin. Finally, the Ural River itself is not just a river, but the Conditional River of Absolute Love.
Part Summary
The narration is conducted on behalf of the main character of the novel Peter Nether. The novel contains ten parts.
Part one. 1918, the period after the revolution. Walking along the Void Street meets a friend of the poet von Ernen, who invites him to visit him. Petr tells Ernen that he was almost arrested by the Chekists for writing a poem. Hearing about this, the owner (who actually also served in this body) puts a gun to the guest's forehead, also about to arrest him, but Peter throws a coat on him and strangles him. Then he takes documents (from which it follows that von Ernen is an employee of the Cheka Grigory Fanerny) and his Mauser, puts on a leather jacket, and then, together with the sailors who mistaken him for Ernen, goes to the Musical Snuffbox cabaret. There he meets Bryusov and drunk Alexei Tolstoy and discusses Blokâs first poem âThe Twelveâ. At the end of this entertainment event with shooting, they drive home, but on the road, the Void falls asleep.
In the second part of the event, they take place already in 1990 in a psychiatric clinic, where, dressed in a straitjacket, the main character wakes up. The diagnosis put to Peter is a split personality, as well as his roommates, by the way. In this part, the doctor practices in order to cure the hypnotic immersion of one patient in the fictional world of another. Therefore, Peter becomes Just Mary from the soap opera. She walked along the ocean until she met her lover Arnold Schwarzenegger. Then they flew together on a military aircraft - the âvertical takeoff fighterâ, where Arnold took the driverâs seat, and Maria sat on the fuselage. The flight ended for her when she fell from the plane - right to the Ostankino television tower. In this episode, Peter got out of hypnosis and fell asleep under the influence of a sedative injection.
The third part begins with the awakening of Peter in Ernenâs apartment. It is again 1918. A mustachioed man in a black tunic, whom he had already seen in a cabaret, plays the piano in the next room. This is Chapaev. He said that he was impressed by the speech delivered by Peter in the cabaret and suggested that he become a commissar and go with him to the Eastern Front. Then they arrive at the Yaroslavsky station in an armored car. There Peter met Furmanov, who is the commander of the weaverâs regiment. They ride in the headquarters train to the front. In the evening, they have dinner with Chapaev and Anna, the âmagnificent machine gunner,â as Chapaev presents her. She says that you need to unhook the final carriage with the weavers, which they do. Then Peter returns to the compartment and falls asleep.
Fourth part. Peter woke up from the fact that someone was shaking his shoulder. This is Volodin. The main character saw that he was lying in a bath with cold water. In the neighborhood, also in the baths, were the coopers - Volodin, Serdyuk and Maria. Peter finds out that they have similar diagnoses. The professor calls this the "split false identity." And the professor calls his method of treating such diseases turbojungism.
During a quiet hour, the protagonist made his way into the office to find his medical history. The papers indicated that he fell ill at the age of 14, when he suddenly stopped all communication and began to read a lot. These were mainly books about emptiness.
Considers himself the heir to the great philosophers of the past
- also appeared in the documents.
After Peter's return to the ward, when the quiet hour was over, he witnessed a quarrel between Maria and Serdyuk. He and Volodin tried to pull away the quarreling when a plaster bust of Aristotle fell on Peter's head. Here the hero loses consciousness.
In the fifth part, he comes to himself lying in an unknown room. Anna comes to him and informs that there was a battle in which Peter got a shell shock, as a result of which he had been in a coma for several months in a hospital in the small town of Altai-Vidnyansk. Then they went out for a walk and came to the restaurant, and Peter realized that Anna was in love with him, to which she replied that she had simply come to visit a fighting friend. After that they quarreled. A certain bald man came and took Anna away. After this episode, the hero talked with Chapaev, who gave him moonshine. Peter returned to his room and fell asleep, but Kotovsky came to him, who, as it turned out, was looking for cocaine.
In the end, the Void falls asleep, and he dreams of Serdyuk, tied to a strange chair, which is in the ward.
In the sixth part, Peter found himself with Serdyuk in the subway. The narration is conducted, as usual, on behalf of the hero, but he himself is not in the described events - here we are talking about Semen Serdyuk. He turns out to be hired as a samurai in a mysterious Japanese organization, where he meets director Kawabata. After some time, Serdyuk learns from him that the shares of the company were bought by competitors, so all clan samurai must make seppuku. Submissive Semyon sticks a sword into his stomach. He comes to his senses already in a modern mental hospital.
The seventh part. Kotovsky at the headquarters of the division discusses a drop of wax in a lamp and asks Peter for drugs. The main character travels with Chapaev to the Black Baron and enters his mystical camp. The events that happened to Peter in the Civil War and the psychiatric hospital are equivalent to each other - this is how Black Baron explains the situation to the main character. Thanks to immersion in a trance, Peter and the baron travel around the world beyond the grave and see the dead fellow soldiers. Then he falls asleep in the room on his bed.
The eighth part is the story of Volodin. He and his two comrades are sitting by the fire in a clearing. They chew dry mushrooms, eat canned food and sausage, drink vodka. Volodin says that the buzz is locked in the person himself, as in a safe. It is impossible to find him without giving up all the blessings. Here the bandits quarreled, began to run through the forest and fired pistols. In the darkness Volodin saw the ghost of the Black Baron. Then all the participants in the party board the jeep and drive off.
In the ninth part, the reader learns that Peter wrote down the previous episode and let Chapaev read it. It turns out that the baron advised the protagonist to leave the hospital. Then Peter tries to look after Anna he met, but she rejects him. In the evening, Void read his poem at a concert of weavers. The performance was greeted with general enthusiasm. Later, the hero falls asleep, but Kotovsky comes to him, who reports that the weavers are about to set fire to the whole city and should leave as soon as possible. Then Peter with Chapaev and Anna make their way to the armored car. Here Anna climbs into the tower with a machine gun and twists it around the circumference. The noise of attack and shooting subside. The machine gun, Chapaev explains, is actually a piece of clay with the little finger of Buddha named Anagama. If you point them to an object, it disappears. This is how its true nature is manifested.
Coming out of the armored car, the satellites saw the Ural River, into which they immediately jumped. Peter came to himself already in the hospital.
In the final tenth, Peter is discharged from a psychiatric hospital. He is trying to get to the Musical Snuffbox, but in modern times it is no longer there. Instead, Peter finds either a pub or a club, orders a drink - vodka with a drug dissolved in it. He writes poetry on a napkin and reads them from the stage. Then he shoots into the chandelier from the handle stolen by him from one of the orderlies - the handle turned out to be a miniature weapon. After all these events, Peter Pustota runs out of the house and sees a familiar armored car.
The final episode of the novel is the main characterâs trip together with Chapaev from modern Moscow to Inner Mongolia:
I ... turned to the door and fell to the peephole. At first, only the blue dots of the lanterns that cut through the frosty air were visible through it, but we drove faster and soon, soon the sands rustled around and the waterfalls rustled in Inner Mongolia dear to my heart.
Reviews on the book "Chapaev and the Void"
Now you can read sharply negative and admiring opinions of both professional critics and ordinary readers.
It is known, for example, that film director Alexander Sokurov and writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn negatively commented on the novel. On the contrary, the critic Gleb Shilovsky expressed this:
The novel is incomparable, no matter what page you start reading. ... Pelevin's prose is intended for the regular reader. It contains both poison and an antidote. His books are a course of treatment, therapy of consciousness.
Dmitry Bykov already mentioned here speaks of Pelevin's work as "a serious novel for repeated re-reading." The general idea, according to the critic, is that
Pelevin seeks a metaphysical explanation for all the most mundane actions and incidents, building many parallel worlds and spaces, living, however, according to one law.
Writer and literary critic Pavel Basinsky called the novel an exotic cactus, unknown for what was grown on the windowsill of Russian culture. According to him, the whole text consists of âcheap punsâ, âmiddle languageâ and âmetaphysical shkodnichestvoâ.
According to the majority of reviews (Victor Pelevin's Chapaev and Void collected a huge amount of impressions left by ordinary readers), the novel is quite an interesting science fiction with numerous references to historical realities. This first impression, of course, is quite simple and superficial.
But it seems to be another extreme: some of Pelevin's written reviews of Chapaev and the Void recommend that, for a more complete understanding of the text, only those who have at least general ideas about the foundations of Buddhism in their intellectual luggage, refer to it in plenty of romance. It would also be nice to understand the intricacies of the absurd in literature and generally navigate the history of Russia and periods of development of its culture.
Without a doubt, the work deserves attention, and many different reviews about Victor Pelevin's Chapaev and Void will be written.
The fate of the work
In 1997, Victor Pelevinâs novel "Chapaev and the Void" was nominated for the Small Booker Prize, became the laureate of the literary prize "Wanderer-97" as a fantastic large-scale work. In 2001, the novel came out in an English translation and was nominated (and then became a finalist) of the Dublin Literary Prize. The translators transformed the name "Chapaev and Void" into The Clay Machine-Gun ("Clay Machine Gun").
Based on the novel, in 2015, the film studios called by the creators of The Little Pinky of the Buddha were shot by the forces of film studios in Russia, Germany and Canada.
Among Pelevinâs books âChapaev and Voidâ is the only one, the play on which has been on the stage for two decades now. The play staged by director Pavel Ursul is attended by a whole galaxy of wonderful actors - Mikhail Efremov, Mikhail Policeitsimako, Mikhail Krylov, Gosha Kutsenko, Pavel Sbornikov, Ksenia Chasovskikh and others.
In the article we gave a summary of Pelevin's novel (full version) "Chapaev and the Void".