The Doors of Deception: Pelevin’s Burning Bush

In a recent email conversation, a colleague and I talked about Viktor Pelevin not being my cup of tea, coffee, or cocoa… that was before I read Операция «Burning Bush» (Operation “Burning Bush”), the first piece in Pelevin’s Ананасная вода для прекрасной дамы (Pineapple Water for the Fair Lady). Burning Bush, like Omon Ra before it (previous post), didn’t turn me into a Pelevin fanatic, but the novella does—continuing with the drink theme—serve up some interesting glasses of kvass.

Kvass tank, 1997.

I don’t like kvass in real life, but I can’t help but appreciate the literary kvass served up in Burning Bush because Pelevin slips in an acid mickey: our first-person narrator, Semyon Levitan, is recruited for a special FSB project that requires training time—lots of training time—spent in a sensory deprivation chamber. While tripping on acid his FSB master puts in his kvass. Part of what makes this novella fun is that it involves none other than George W. Bush: Levitan’s initial mission is to speak, as God, with Bush through an implant in Bush’s tooth. Don’t worry, Levitan is an English teacher who’s more than capable of chatting with Bush.

I haven’t read a lot of Pelevin but I certainly recognized elements that felt like spillovers from Omon Ra: strange secret government programs that require strange secret training and result in strange secret deceptions. There’s also a spiritual element that plays off Daniil Andreyev’s Роза мира (The Rose of the World), a book I’ve never read. Someone once gave it to me as a gift but it got lost in transit somewhere between Moscow and Maine, in an ill-fated box that also contained Lolita, The Brothers Karamazov, and materials about evaluating NGO projects. I hope everyone’s coexisting somewhere in peace. The important thing here is that the references to Andreyev involve Stalin and Satan.

Pelevin generally tends to lose me somewhere, to some degree, and Burning Bush is no exception: I thought the novella worked best before Pelevin began referencing The Rose of the World. The problem isn’t so much that I hadn’t read Andreyev—there’s a chunk of text in Burning Bush, I’d already heard about The Rose of the World, and it’s easy to find background online—but that Pelevin’s use of Andreyev felt a little too heavy-handed to me as a part of the story, even though the Satan element itself fits just fine. I generally seem to think Pelevin’s satire and descriptions of twisted but almost realistic contemporary situations and characters are the best aspects of his books, so I was pleased Burning Bush is a more restrained piece than some others I’ve read—Numbers comes to mind—and doesn’t implode by getting too outlandish too fast.

Which is to say it was the light, fun stuff that made Burning Bush good evening reading material after some long work days. There was plenty to enjoy: Levitan’s ability to imitate voices, the very thought of someone chatting with Bush through Bush’s tooth, fun references to Russian poetry, Tony Blair, and American political and pop culture, including Pulp Fiction, which is wildly popular in Russia. Speaking of “light,” I’ve purposely gone light on some of the details in Burning Bush in case the novella is ever translated into English.

A Note on the NatsBest: The National Bestseller award is back, with new sponsorship from film company United Partnership and the television channel 2x2. The seven-member jury that will choose the winner includes two representatives from the new sponsors and two writers: Sergei Zhadan, whose Voroshilovgrad (previous post) I read in Zaven Babloyan’s Ukrainian-to-Russian translation, and Aleksandr Terekhov, who won last year’s NatsBest for Germans. This year’s winner will be announced on June 2.

Level for Nonnative Readers of Russian: 2.0 out of 5.0, though the book may have felt easier than it is because of the humor.

Russian Name: Виктор Пелевин

Up Next: I’m not sure! NatsBest, perhaps a mishmash of short stories or Leonid Iuzefovich’s Prince of the Wind… or letter S favorite writers…

Image Credit: Kvas vendor, 1997, in Kaliningrad/Königsberg/Koenigsberg, from MicHael Galkovsky, via Wikipedia. I remember seeing these kvass tanks on the street!