Vol. 2, Number 1	Spring 1999 issue

 

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Victor Pelevin's latest book, A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia and Other Stories, contains eight well-crafted stories about life after the breakup of the U.S.S.R. Pelevin invents surreal, Catch 22-like situations--as in Sleep, where a college student teaches himself to study while he's asleep. In the eponymous A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia, a group of bureaucrats metamorphose nightly into werewolves who possess a certain élan that their mechanized human counterparts lack. The contrast shows, ironically, that werewolves are not the "problem"--man is.

While some of his tales may bore, the passion that Pelevin brings to each is so intense that it drags the reader through the duller moments. The combination of this intensity with the high literary value of some of the stories is enough to reward a reading.

The immense diversity of Pelevin's stories allows him to analyze the post-Soviet psyche from a variety of angles. Russia's political and economic crises are the subject of much research and debate. The concomitant existential crises have gone relatively unnoticed--yet they might, Pelevin warns us, have even greater repercussions if Russians become capitalist automatons and forget the importance of changing into werewolves at night.