Recycling of Soviet Culture in Victor Pelevin’s Prose

Abstract

The purpose of the study is to analyse the functions that recycling of Soviet culture performs in V. Pelevin’s works. The paper defines recycling and determines its significant role in postmodernist texts. The researcher considers both Pelevin’s early creative work and later texts, identifies the evolutionary nature of recycling of Soviet culture in his creative work. The study is novel in that it is the first to consider Pelevin’s creative work through the lens of recycling. As a result, variability of Pelevin’s attitude to Soviet culture (ranging from irony to nostalgia) has been shown. In addition to debunking Soviet myths, various ways of recycling of Soviet culture are being identified, including secondary mythologisation of characters or events already mythologised in Soviet times.

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Funding

The reported study was funded by the RSF, project number 19-18-00414, “Soviet Culture Today (Forms of Cultural Recycling in Russian Art and Aesthetics of the Everyday Life. The 1990s-2010s)”.

Author information

About this article

Publication history

• Received: November 7, 2021.
• Published: December 28, 2021.

Keywords

• постмодернизм
• ресайклинг
• Пелевин
• советская культура
• postmodernism
• recycling
• Pelevin
• Soviet culture

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© 2021 The Author(s)
© 2021 Gramota Publishing, LLC

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Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)