A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia and Other Stories

by Victor Pelevin, Andrew Bromfield (Translator)

Russian writers tend to gravitate toward either Tolstoyan gravity or Gogol's brand of feather-light fabulism. Victor Pelevin, the author of four previous books, most definitely belongs in the latter camp. His work may be grounded in the grubby realities of contemporary Russia, but the food shortages, decaying apartment blocks, and political chaos serve him as a kind of naturalistic springboard from which he launches into one antic leap after another. Pelevin's latest collection is a case in point. The title story finds a young, Moscow-based slacker visiting the countryside, hoping for a little bucolic enlightenment. Instead, he stumbles across a pack of werewolves deep in the forest, who hastily induct him into their numbers. Pelevin expertly conveys Sasha's brand-new lupine perceptions: the way he can now "distinguish the creaking of a branch in the wind a hundred yards from the clearing and the chirping of a cricket coming from precisely the opposite direction." But as the pack heads into a nearby village, it becomes clear that Sasha has been chosen to purge a treacherous, four-legged comrade. Perestroika notwithstanding, man is still a wolf to man--and vice versa.

Elsewhere, in "Sleep," a student discovers that the rest of the world is in a state of slumber, and promptly gets with the program himself. "It was all very confusing, and in order to be able to tell whether he was asleep or not at any particular moment, Nikita began carrying a small pin with a big, round, green head in his pocket, and whenever he was in any doubt, he pricked his thigh, and everything became clear. Then, of course, there was the new fear that he might simply dream that he was pricking himself with the pin, but Nikita drove that thought from his mind as quite unbearable." Political allegory? Existential parable? Arguably these stories are both--but Pelevin's talent is much too large and unpredictable to be jammed into such generic pigeonholes. He's a brilliant original who seems to get better (and funnier) with each book. --James Marcus

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Russia, Russian Literature, Fantasy, Contemporary, Anthologies

176 pages, Paperback

First published November 5, 1998

About the author

Victor Olegovich Pelevin is a Russian fiction writer. His books usually carry the outward conventions of the science fiction genre, but are used to construct involved, multi-layered postmodernist texts, fusing together elements of pop culture and esoteric philosophies. Some critics relate his prose to the New Sincerity and New Realism literary movements.

RU: Виктор Пелевин

Reviews

[Edward · Rating 2 out of 5]

This collection of eight short stories is a book I would never have read, had it not been the selection of a book group member who became enthused about Pelevin and has read three or four of his other works. Based on this one, I've had enough. I think, or rather I'm guessing, that there are too many cultural references that just don't translate very well to a western audience..

All of the stories have to do, finally, with the "meaning of life" which may sound pretentious, but they root the question in particular circumstances in what I would call surreal satire and point out that ordinary people find their existences endlessly frustrating. The first (the title story) and the last, "The Prince of Gosplan" both have a character named Sasha. Sasha, in the last story, seems to work in a Kafkaesque office where his life and that of computer games he plays merge so that one becomes indistinguishable from the other. He is attempting to reach the higher levels of his game-existence, only to find himself always trapped, and in the end he dreams of a Sufi figure, Abbas and a meeting with him always results in death.

The first story, which could just as easily be the last, concerns a hitchhiker in a remote central Asian province who stumbles on a group of werewolves who at night seem to be incarnations of ordinary people who are asleep - literally at night, and politically during the day. But at night they turn into werewolves and satisfy their blood lust by running amuck and attacking livestock as well as fighting with each other. They feel fully alive and Sasha himself becomes one of them, and "felt the meaning of life continuously and clearly." The satirical meaning seems clear - people in this society are so deadened to the limitations of life around them that they become only "alive" by resorting to a more primitive and irrational life style. If this is the case, then the future of Russian society is not encouraging.

Another story, "Sleep" returns to this idea. Everyone is sleepwalking through their lives all the time, but since they're not aware that they're unaware, how can you get them to "wake up" I think Pelevin's solution is to write these weirdly absurd satires which try to jolt the reader out of his normal perceptions.

It's to the advantages, too, of the rulers of this society to keep people from seeing the truth, to keep them mentally asleep. In "Bulldozder Driver's Day" children are led to the "Museum of Glory" where they are fed lies, reminiscent of the propaganda ministry in Orwell's 1984 where war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength.

To recapitulate, a little of this satire goes a long way, and after several stories, I've gotten the point. But some readers will no doubt enjoy more and more examples of Pelevin's continued cleverness and imagination as he attacks the follies of Russian society.

[Aaron · Rating 4 out of 5]

It'd be an interesting experiment in sociology to give a group of socio-anthropologists nothing but the canon of distopian/absurdist Russian literature and make them try to extrapolate an idea of what Russian culture is actually like:

"We have concluded that the primary export of this theoretical Russian people is the generation and training of cosmonauts and gigantic, steam-driven hammers which are used to smash iron ore. The supernatural is possible with the permission of the Party. All government endeavors (space flight, the army, war) are simulations of their actual equivalent which are, in reality, real."

By now, I've managed to get through Zamyatin, Bulgakov, Pelevin, whatever, and while I liked them all, this is a good genre for making me feel like I'm not so in on the joke. I understand Perestroika, Glasnost, etc in only the broadest terms, and while all of this Soviet History for Dummies collegiate stuff makes me feel like I can at least approximate the primary themes of what these books are about, the absurdist satire stuff is sticky because I'm not always sure what they're ridiculing. For me, it's often just a series of wonderfully written, semiotically charged non-sequitors that I just flail away at for those occasional paragraphs of near understanding and resulting self-congratulation. So while I love the what-the-hell-just-happened Soviet/Russian fiction (which doesn't include guys like Nabokov or Dostoevsky, who actually write with a sort of three-dimensionality that doesn't require you to grow up in Soviet Russia or have a master's degree in such to make sense of them), I spend a lot of time on the outside. This isn't to say I didn't think We or The Master and Margarita were very, very, very good, but I still wonder intensely if my reading of them isn't fatally, thoroughly compromised by my non-Russian-ness.

This also isn't meant to be a broad commentary on foreign lit - I read Werewolf Problem at about the same time as Mo Yan's Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out, and for all of the latter's zany anthropomorphisms, I didn't feel nearly so in the dark.

Werewolf Problem is full of these small moments of alienation. A woman falls through a hole in reality shaped like the USSR to transmogrify into a minor character in a lost Canonical text in one story, a guy bashes his way through the lifesize simulacrum of what seem like Atari-classics in another, it's all very interesting but I can't shake the feeling that this all means something I don't fully understand. The title story and Ontology of Childhood were especially good, even in the partial, halting, self-smacking way I managed to get through them. I recommend this book for the smart, the patient. I'm off to read a graphic novel.

[Luke · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5/5

This is a book by an author whom I first read at the almost exact right time in my life for being receptive to such a combination of style, theme, and subject material. Unfortunately, that moment in time happened to be both hyper specific and highly unstable, meaning that, had I wanted to read the two other works by Pelevin that I added after my success with The Yellow Arrow, it should have been within one to maybe three years of my first read of him, not twelve. As it stands, thanks to the author's conducive relationship with having his works being freely accessible on the Internet, I can tell you quite a bit of what's going on in each of these stories, which would be useful to those with more than a mild interest in post-Soviet Russian lit, or postmodernism, or 21st century breeds of Orientalism. Unfortunately for me, the time when I put my faith in such matters has long since passed, and a lifetime's experience with dealing with techie/venture capitalist Silicon Valley dude bros has left me less than sympathetic to the main conceit of most of these tales. I will say that I enjoyed the first story with minimal reservations, and that I'm glad I was able to figure all this out for free thanks to a local library. And if you yourself are wondering how you'd vibe with Pelevin and don't want to commit to a New Directions purchase, just look up his Wiki page and have at it.

[John Naylor · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a difficult book to review. This is mostly due to my own limitations and lack of knowledge of Russian culture rather than anything the author could be blamed for. Out of the eight short stories I honestly enjoyed two if them immensely, felt that four were not as good and had two that I admit I didn't really understand.

The first story (which the book was named after) was great. It was a new twist on the werewolf legend and an enjoyable take upon it. It was definitely the story I enjoyed the best. I am not going to review the stories one by one as it would only prove my ignorance further.

This is a collection of stories that is always intriguing and also one that is definitely different to anything that could have come out of any country except Russia. I recommend it to those who want to broaden their reading horizons. If you do read it then maybe one day we can discuss it and we can understand it better together.

[Andy Weston · Rating 3 out of 5]

As expected, the title story dominates this collection.
Teenager Sasha is down on life, and as he leaves town to look for something different he stumbles upon a group of people with the ability to turn themselves into wolves. It revitalises him, his appreciation and awareness of things around him is heightened.
The other stories are strange and surreal and border on the juvenile, but fun and easy to read - not though I think, very memorable, except for the first one.

[Jessica · Rating 2 out of 5]

My Amazon review: A book of difficult stories, at best, the first story, "A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia", about a wanderer who happens upon a pack of werewolves, and the last story "Prince of Gosplan", which meshes the real world with the world of computer games, are the two stellar and meaningfully understandable stories in this collection.

Whether it is my own ignorance of Russian/Soviet history and life, my lack of philosophical depth, and/or issues of translating Russian to English, the 6 other stories in this collection left me mostly confused and frustrated.

In "Vera Pavlovna's Ninth Dream", a bathroom attendant suffers from severe solipsism and its disturbing consequences.

In "Sleep", a student succumbs to the belief that everyone around him is "sleeping" through their daily lives.

In "Tai Shou Chuan USSR", a Chinese citizen metaphysically becomes a powerful force in the Russian government.

"The Tarzan Swing" is an alternating tale of death vs. mental illness.

In "The Ontology of Childhood", a young child describes what seems to be his life in a prison cell.

And "Bulldozer Driver's Day" details the daily life of a working class citizen determined to break out of the mold.

All seemingly straightforward, these stories constantly twist and turn through the surreal and metaphysical in ways that, without interpretation, leave the reader in a philosophical fog. I would love to re-read this with expert interpretations as I am sure the insights are fascinating, but as a literary layman I find I may be missing much of the good stuff that I am certain can be found here.

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

The dust jacket compares Victor Pelevin's work with Kafka, Bulgakov, Philip K Dick and Joseph Heller, but the comparisons that came to mind for me were with Nikolai Gogol and the Strugatskii brothers. My favourite stories in this book were the title story, and the concluding novella "Prince of Gosplan", which reimagines late-Soviet life as a bunch of computer games: the hero is like a male Lara Croft with worse resolution. If you like surrealism, absurdism and the convolutions in time and space caused by bureaucracy gone mad, this is the book for you.

[Chris - Quarter Press Editor · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the kind of bizarre I expect to see more and more in "traditional" fiction--and this guy was doing it 10 years ago. Seriously, we need to loosen up, allow video games and werewolves and solipsism practicing clerks to fill the literature shelves. Not all the stories struck the right cord, but not one of them felt like anything I'd read before, and in this day and age, that is a rarity indeed.

[Ffiamma · Rating 1 out of 5]

pessimo.
il grande merito dei russi contemporanei è che fanno venire una gran voglia di (ri)leggere i classici.

[Wayne · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a tricky review for me. The stories in this book are highly original, thought provoking and intellectual. Pelevin's stories keep the interest of the reader quite nicely. So why only a three star rating?

In order for a book to be successful for me, I need to enter the book. I need to feel something, anticipate something, want something. A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia only achieved these feelings within me as I read the short story from which the book gets its name. I was emotionally invested in the story of the young man that turns into a werewolf. The rest of the stories were excellently written, very thought provoking but, for me, they were intellectual exercises that never reached the level of entertainment.

It goes without saying, this is a book that polarizes the reader. Depending upon what you expect in your reading material, you may be delighted or bored. I was never bored but I was never delighted either. So, take this review for what it's worth. Decide for yourself if it sounds like something you'd like to read.

[Karl Kraus · Rating 5 out of 5]

The other day I was watching Fassbinder's *Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant* and noticed, during the scene where the title character is betrayed by her romantic obsession, the sound of a rooster in the distance. "Hmm," I wondered. "Will the cock crow exactly two more times?" And indeed it did. I patted myself on the back for my perspicacity, but then got to wondering whether so much of what we appreciate about art is really some kind of intellectualized Easter Egg Hunt: The author buries meanings, and we dig them up. Of course this can be done well or poorly, and it can certainly be overdone. Hello, Thomas Mann! Hello, Richard Wagner! Hmm, whenever I'm forced to listen to *Ring* bits, I find myself wishing that he'd been at least a little bit arbitrary in employing all those leitmotifs; maybe then they'd be a little less painfully redundant to the action.

Enter Pelevin. The really exciting thing about Pelevin is there's plenty of metaphor at work, but one can never be quite sure how much of it means, or is supposed to mean, anything. Certainly some of it does, and I imagine someone in Yeltsin-era Russia would derive more from it than I can, especially if that someone also had a good background in, say, East Asian thought. But in any case there's enough there to have any reader thinking long after setting down the book, and (time permitting) rereading.

Perhaps the best way to approach this collection is by starting with the last story, "Prince of Gosplan." The overriding conceit is fairly obvious: depersonalization in an authoritarian-hierarchical society is similar to being a character in a video game (we used to call this the "rat race"), and indeed the characters in the story slip in and out of the "real world" and into video games. Then move on to the title story and the others.

Those who have never read Pelevin are probably best advised to start with the collection of stories published as *The Blue Lantern*. It's easy to identify with the pathos of a shed that wishes to be a bicycle, for instance, and if you strip the story "Hermit and Six-Toes" of the philosophical musings of the two title characters -- which are, by the way, chickens -- you get the movie *Chicken Run.* Which Pelevin preceded by nearly a decade. Hmm, maybe he should sue.

A challenging but rewarding collection.

[Jemma · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pelevin has a wonderful eye for detail, and this translation by Andrew Bromfield has some lovely little turns of phrase. I found myself enjoying more of the stories than not, especially their critical magical realism and surrealism, but in addition to his sense of fantasy and specificity, Pelevin has a habit with his twist endings that diverged so far from everything already established that they tended to alienate me from the story right as it finished. I think the only one that didn't do that at all was the titular story, and it was definitely one of my favorites. The most interesting ones structurally were "The Ontology of Childhood" and "Prince of Gosplan;" they were also very strong conceptually, as were "Sleep" and "The Tarzan Swing," though I enjoyed the former more than the latter thanks to that habit of climactic twists souring the reading experience. I definitely want to look into more of his work, especially in context with other Soviet and post-Soviet critical fiction.

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of the short stories remind me of the brilliance of YELLOW ARROW, while others read like a particularly fevered, impressionist dream. His stories always had a lot of philosophies wrapped in either the story plot and /or in the characters / characters' speeches. Some of it seems more indecipherable than usual. I am not sure whether it's because I just don't have the cultural / historical background for stories or if the disjointed ambiguity is on purpose or what. All the stories will definitely make you think, though how the Asian / Middle East culture are depicted made me side-eye 2 of the stories. Four stars despite that because the writing is just that good.

[James Henderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

The titular story alone makes the book worth reading as it is worthy of comparison with the best from other imaginative story-tellers.
"And in the center of the clearing he suddenly noticed a skull on a wooden stake thrust into the earth--the skull was long and narrow, with powerful jaws. A dog maybe? No, more like a wolf."

Another of my favorites from the collection was "The Ontology of Childhood".
"Something was happening to the world where you were growing up--every day it changed slightly, every day your surroundings took on a new shade of meaning."

Filled with the satire if everything Soviet, but also human, it is a sublime source of black comedy.

[Jeff · Rating 2 out of 5]

The title story in this collection is great, and even though the book was published in 1994, it still was a fresh take on the whole werewolf genre.

From there, the stories were less interesting to me. Part of it may be due to the fact that they're decades old now (the last story in particular is about technology, but the technology at the time was DOS), but I'm sure that I missed a lot due to my lack of knowledge about daily life in Russia and recent Russian history.

First story = worth a read. Later stories = not so much (unless you know a lot about Russia).

[Alexis · Rating 3 out of 5]

On the cover, it is described as "delirious." That seems about right. For the most part, I feel like I essentially understood these stories at an incredibly surface level, if at all. I generally liked the vibe (generally questioning the nature of reality), but I oscillated between two stars and three for quite a while. My favorites were probably The Ontology of Childhood and Prince of Gosplan. There aren't any I particularly disliked.

[Yash · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this book fascinating because I've never been exposed to this kind of absurdist literature before.

This was a tough read, while also an interesting experiment to try to glean the ideas Pelevin is trying to put forth.

Is this book disruptive? Probably.

Dangerous? Possibly.

I'll probably update this review once I've had a chance to let this stew in my mind for a bit.

[NCHS Library]

From Follett
A werewolf problem in Central Russia -- Vera Pavlovna's ninth dream -- Sleep -- Tai Shou Chuan USSR (A Chinese folk tale) -- The Tarzan swing -- The ontology of childhood -- Bulldozer driver's day -- Prince of Gosplan. The absurd becomes the truth in this magnificent collection of eight short stories by the contemporary post-Soviet Union author.

[RedDagger · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'll admit, I read this mostly for the eponymous short story that opens the collection, but the rest fit a similar theme - heavy commentary on russia with magical leanings here and there. Something like fairy tales with a not quite so clear moral and a not quite so quaint setting, being pretty typical late-soviet writing.

[Saleh Razzouk]

Do not expect easy endeavour. It is an experimental work. Part of the new faith movement. Or the post modernism.
In Arabic is classified as Writings. Many liberal arabs write using this style.
Most Pelevin's fiction is dreamy writing touching on the nightmare the world is running into.

[Nenad Pavlović · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gray, dreary, but profound, and wildly fantastic, with fantasy elements used in a manner similar to magic realism, not for their own sake but to convey a thought process. Also, dreams. These are dreams, written down and spit-polished.

[Jam Cole · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very strange book of short stories! There are ups and downs. Works better when you read it as part of a book group and get to talk through - though provoking at best...

[Kassandra · Rating 3 out of 5]

Uneven collection. The title story is brilliant. I also enjoyed "Vera Pavlovna's Ninth Dream" and "The Ontology of Childhood". A bit too much casual racism in some of the other stories.

[Un Moine Vexé]

Oddly satisfying.

[Alan Dean · Rating 3 out of 5]

pretty good. 'sleep' is definitely the best story

[F Gato · Rating 3 out of 5]

2 stories good, 1 depressing. The others I can’t understand.

[Eddie Gunner · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well i liked some sotries more then others i think first one was best and last one was most boring, game thing ....

[Daniel Polansky]

Surrealist post-Soviet shorts. Weird and impossible and thoroughly enjoyable.

[Kristenmb · Rating 4 out of 5]

Surrealist perfection

[Gabino G. Ocampo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some stories work really well, like the one that gives the name to the book, and others are just odd in a negative way.