Viktor Pelevin
Viktor Pelevin Виктор Олегович Пелевин
Viktor Pelevin is Russian fiction writer. His books are multi-layered postmodernist texts fusing elements of pop and esoteric philosophies while carrying conventions of the science fiction genre. Pelevin travels to Asia often, and has been to Nepal, South Korea, China and Japan. While he does not call himself a Buddhist, he is engaged in Buddhist practices. Pelevin has repeatedly said that despite the fact that his characters use drugs, he is not an addict even though he has experimented with mind-expanding substances in his youth.
Translated Titles by Victor Pelevin
The collapse of the Soviet Union has opened up a huge consumer market, but how do you sell things to a generation that grew up with just one type of cola? When Tatarsky, a frustrated poet, takes a job as an advertising copywriter, he finds he has a talent for putting distinctively Russian twists on Western-style ads. But his success leads him into a surreal world of spin doctors, gangsters, drug trips, and the spirit of Che Guevera, who, by way of a Ouija board, communicates theories of consumer theology. A bestseller in Russia, Homo zapiens displays the biting absurdist satire that has gained Victor Pelevin superstar status among today’s Russian youth, disapproval from the conservative Moscow literary world, and critical acclaim worldwide.
Omon is chosen to be trained in the Soviet space program, the fulfillment of his lifelong dream. However, he enrolls only to encounter the terrifying absurdity of Soviet protocol and its backward technology: a bicycle-powered moonwalker; the outrageous Colonel Urgachin; and a one-way assignment to the moon.
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Mikhail Shishkin
Mikhail Shishkin Михаил Павлович Шишкин
Mikhail Pavlovich Shishkin was born 18 January 1961 in Moscow (Russia). He is a Russian-Swiss writer and the only author to have won all three of Russia’s most prestigious literary awards: Russian Booker Prize (2000), the Russian National Bestseller (2005), and the Big Book Prize (2010). With a Russian father and a Ukrainian mother, he has lived in exile in Switzerland for the past 18 years; he opposed the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and is an outspoken critic of Putin and the “special military operation” in Ukraine. He writes in Russian and German. His books have been translated into 30 languages.
Translated Titles by Mikhail Shishkin
The Light and the Dark is a love story of Vladimir, a solider flighting the Boxer Rebellion, and Alexandra. Known fondly to each other as Vovka and Sashka, the two young lovers sustain their love by writing passionate letters to each other. But as their correspondence continues, it becomes clear that the couple’s separation is chronological as well as geographical—that their extraordinary romance is actually created out of, as well as kept alive by, their yearning epistolary exchange, which defies not only space but time
The protagonist of Maidenhair, like the author, is an interpreter for the Swiss immigration authorities. The book opens with a reference to Xenophon, which the interpreter is reading during his breaks, and then plunges into a series of interviews with asylum seekers, often from Chechnya, recounting horrors.
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