Viktor Pelevin is one of the most mysterious writers of our time; a few years ago practically nothing was known about him. He does not appear in public, leads a reclusive lifestyle and rarely talks to journalists. But his books are published annually and are very popular among young Russian readers.
Brief biography and the beginning of a career as a writer
Pelevin Viktor Olegovich was born on November 22, 1962 in Moscow. He was the son of a military officer and manager of a grocery store. Pelevin studied at a prestigious English special school and graduated in 1979. Then he studied electrical engineering at the Moscow Power Engineering Institute and even worked for some time as an engineer at the Department of Electrical Transport in his alma mater.
In 1989, Victor entered the Literary Institute, but already in his second year he was expelled. At this time, he met the writer A. Egazarov and the poet V. Kulla, with whom he founded his own publishing house. For some time he worked as a journalist in the publishing house Face to Face and in the magazine "Science and Religion", which published the first story of the writer. Already in 1991, the first collection of the writer's stories, entitled "Blue Lantern", was published, for which he was awarded the "Small Booker", "Interpresscon" and "Golden Snail" prizes.
Creative activity
Although Pelevin projects a somewhat antique personal image, he lives as a recluse, practicing Buddhist meditation as a way to escape the chaos of life around him. His fiction is in the tradition of such Russian writers as Nikolai Gogol, Maxim Gorky and Mikhail Bulgakov. Pelevin himself admitted that Bulgakov, Kafka and William S. Burroughs influenced his work.
Pelevin was despised by the official literary establishment, and he lived completely outside of the Russian literary society. However, some of his works have won prestigious awards. Not only were his works very popular with young Russian readers, but they were also highly valued in the foreign literary world, which saw in them a continuation of the tradition of Russian protest literature.
Among the first works of Pelevin - the allegorical story "Yellow Arrow", which takes place on a train moving towards a destroyed bridge, and the main character is trying to understand the world and get off the train. The novel "Omon Ra" is a surreal exposure of the Soviet space program during the years of Leonid Brezhnev. The second novel, The Life of Insects, is a kind of allegory for human life. Among Pelevin's other works, novels can be distinguished:
- Chapaev and Emptiness (1996);
- Helm of Terror: Kreatiff of Theseus and the Minotaur (2005);
- Empire V (2006);
- Batman Apollo (2013);
- IPhuck 10 (2017) and others.
Personal life
There were a lot of rumors around Pelevin's personality, since he is one of the most mysterious figures in the world of literature. The point is that the writer is not part of the "literary get-together" and practically does not appear in public. He has no social media accounts and rarely gives interviews. It is known that Victor Pelevin is not married.
