Breaking into a New Era? A Cultural-Semiotic Reading of Viktor Pelevin

In two novels of the contemporary Russian writer Viktor Pelevin, Generation “P” and “Chisla”, post-Soviet identity and meaning emerge constantly out of the (sometimes literal) clashes between bipolar ideological, cultural and temporal notions: socialism versus capitalism, Russia versus the West, old versus new. The novels clearly evoke the thesis of a binary impulsion in the dynamics of Russian culture, proposed by the Moscow-Tartu school of semiotics. In this article I argue that Pelevin, on both a stylistic and thematic level, dwells consciously on famous (cultural) semiotic notions of duality and in many cases subjects them to postmodernist deconstruction and irony.