Victor Pelevin, Homo Zapiens (New York, Penguin Books: 2002); originally published 1999.
There are few things in this world as eerie as seeing satire come to life. There was the 2014 episode of This American Life, for example, which made a joke about a hypothetical dystopian future in which the president of the United States had become none other than the crass real estate dealer and reality TV personality Donald Trump. But it's not only in the United States where apparently sardonic and unserious remixes of our cultural detritus can turn out to be prophetic. Reading Russian author Victor Pelevin's novel Homo Zapiens (to give its title in the U.S. release), one has the sense that he foretold the entirety of the Putin era before it had even begun.
To fully appreciate the extent to which this is true, it is perhaps necessary to read Pelevin's novel shortly after encountering Peter Pomerantsev's 2014 book, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible—a journalistic account of his time making TV documentaries in Russia during the early Putin era, as the scope for genuinely independent media and civil society was steadily closing. I listened to Pomerantsev's book on a recent road trip. This weekend, I read Pelevin's novel in paperback. And what became frighteningly clear as I did so is that what Pelevin wrote as fiction in 1998—the tail end of the Yeltsin era—could be written as fact by the time Pomerantsev was publishing his book just 16 years later.
Everything Pomerantsev describes in nonfiction prose was already there in Pelevin's novel: the manipulation of the media, the staged politics, the orchestrated conflicts with the Chechens for purposes of cementing political gain, the whole gestalt of the postmodern autocracy that Vladimir Putin has developed in the decades since the novel appeared. Pelevin depicts a New Russia at the end of the Yeltsin era that, he predicts, will soon degenerate into dictatorship. It will be inflected by psuedo-Slavophile and Russian nationalist imagery, but of an ersatz and distinctly nihilistic variety. It will combine agitprop, kompromat, and the other methods of the former Soviet police state with the hyper-capitalist ethos of a modern PR firm... it will be, in short, exactly the system Putin has set up.
Of course, Pelevin is writing over-the-top satire, so in his version, the politicians of the Duma literally turn out to be CGI puppets that are animated and ventriloquized by the country's true rulers. But the reality of the Putin system that Pomerantsev depicts in his 2014 book, with its elaborately-orchestrated disinformation campaigns, its Potemkin politics, its kayfabe clashes between ostensible political rivals all of whom are ultimately subservient to the central regime—the false pretense of "choice" and "alternatives" that hide the fact that in the end there is only one true, central clique—all of these are core themes of Pelevin's novel as well. (As is made clear from the very first page, where Pelevin explains what he means by "Generation P"—the novel's original title.)
How could Pelevin have known as early as 1998 that this is where things would be headed in the New Russia? I suppose because many key elements of it were already in place by 1998. The prominence of organized crime and the oligarchs was already evident—both figure in Pelevin's plot, including Boris Berezovsky by name... but much of the resonances between the novel and subsequent history can only be attributed to an uncanny ability to predict from the spirit of the times—whatever was in the air in Moscow in 1998—the direction that Russia's politics would ultimately take. Pelevin envisions, for example, a group of advertising gurus and PR men who run a series of dummy elections with fake, computer-generated candidates from behind the scenes...
Minus the CGI, this is essentially the portrait that Pomerantsev paints of how actual politics work in Putin's Russia, with the figure of Vladislav Surkov being the real-life version of the "Institute of Apiculture" in Pelevin's cyberpunk vision. As Pomerantsev describes him, Surkov truly is the ultimate postmodern vizier—a sort of cybernetic Cardinal Richelieu whose specialty is the manipulation of images, disinformation, and media storylines in much the way Pelevin imagines. How can reality have so closely mimicked in this way the hypothetical future that Pelevin foretold? Maybe Surkov read the novel and missed that it was supposed to be satire. Or maybe this is just one more instance of a dictum of Wilde's, which Pelevin references in the novel in a kind of meta-prescience: namely, that life imitates art far more often than art imitates life.
At a time when the reach of Putin's system is affecting people around the world, all of this makes Pelevin's novel a timely and essential read. Since it merits fresh readers and a new edition for the political moment in which we find ourselves, I note the following typos for the benefit of future proofreaders:
p. 24 "Tatarsky began rememerin" (sic)
p. 77 "Al Rice" (sic)—the book Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, which launches Tatarsky's career in advertising, was actually written by Al Ries (and Jack Trout).
p. 127 "the world hadn't give [sic] him anything else either"
p. 145 "what if somewhat leaves..." (sic)
p. 149 "At least there was no on [sic] sitting at the immense desk..."
p. 153 "I don't completely believe it. here, for instance..." (sic)
p. 159 "which way he should direct his thoughts So he decided" (sic)
p. 180 "against the rear windsow [sic]"
p. 188 "You'd have to [do] something..."
p. 191 "I could replace the lot [of] you all on my own"
p. 208 "Fortunately, it is not too difficul [sic] to improvise..."
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