Pelevin and Unfreedom: Poetics, Politics, Metaphysics

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Sofya Khagi’s Pelevin and Unfreedom: Poetics, Politics, Metaphysics is the first book-length English-language study of Victor Pelevin, one of the most significant and popular Russian authors of the post-Soviet era. The text explores Pelevin’s sustained Dostoevskian reflections on the philosophical question of freedom and his complex oeuvre and worldview, shaped by the idea that contemporary social conditions pervert that very notion. Khagi shows that Pelevin uses provocative and imaginative prose to model different systems of unfreedom, vividly illustrating how the present world deploys hyper-commodification and technological manipulation to promote human degradation and social deadlock. Rather than rehearse Cold War–era platitudes about totalitarianism, Pelevin holds up a mirror to show how social control (now covert, yet far more efficient) masquerades as freedom and how eagerly we accept, even welcome, control under the techno-consumer system. He reflects on how commonplace discursive markers of freedom (like the free market) are in fact misleading and disempowering. Under this comfortably self-occluding bondage, the subject loses all power of self-determination, free will, and ethical judgment. In his work, Pelevin highlights the unprecedented subversion of human society by the techno-consumer machine. Yet, Khagi argues, however circumscribed and ironically qualified, he holds onto the emancipatory potential of ethics and even an emancipatory humanism.

Author(s): Sofya Khagi
Series: Studies in Russian Literature and Theory
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Year: 2021

Language: English

Contents
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction. Fifty Shapes of Grid
Part I: Techno-consumer dystopia
Chapter One. After the Fall
Chapter Two. Language Games
Part II: Posthumanism
Chapter Three. Biomorphic Monstrosities
Chapter Four. Can Digital Men Think?
Part III: History
Chapter Five. Not with a Bang but a Whimper
Chapter Six. Butterflies in Sunflower Oil
Part IV: Intertext and Irony
Chapter Seven. Somersaults of Thought
Chapter Eight. The Total Art of Irony
Conclusion. A Christmas Carol with Qualifiers
Notes
Bibliography
Index