Cache and two portfolios

New Pelevin - about the dollar and Russia, with love and any abomination

Victor Pelevin. Mafusail lamp, or the extreme battle of the Chekists with Masons. M.: Exmo, 2016.

In the new novel, Pelevin has trips, conspiracy, verbal games, multiple universes, alternative history, ancient deities, accurate observations of today's realities and a kind of general theory of everything; However, listing this is like saying that Pelevin’s novel is printed on paper. It has already become familiar that the new Pelevin was, at best, the old Pelevin managed to slightly forget; To the next book, subordinating to the seasonal cycles, you approaches the book of the new album that the species that did not confess the agility of the rock band-no one expects breakthroughs from it in an unknown one, it is more important to understand what this is similar to what is already heard; This is a “return to the form” or “stomping in place”; It is rather “A Momentary Lapse of Reason” or somewhere closer to “Animals”; No one has been calculating for the new “Piper at the Gates of Dawn” - this happens in life only once, we understand.

So, we went: a financial analyst specializing in gold, having survived the exchange collapse (and having lowered the capital of the FSB higher officials into the pipe), goes on a trip inside himself with the help of pellets who have long been loved by the Pelevin reader. There, he meets the spiritual-chitin patron, flying from the story of Edgar of Poe, discovers the matrix of his “I”, consisting of stupids of other people's texts, experiences a bizarre deformation of sexuality (a similar case was depicted in the painting “Search for the inner Pinocchio” from the story “Buldozerian Day”), and comprehends the true nature of financial capital and comprehends the true nature of financial capital and civilization based on it - et cetera, et cetera; From other Pelevin psychonauts, he is only distinguished by the fact that he operates with the terms “liberals” and “cotton wool”, with the same ease writes for the resources of both directions and ruthlessly passes through vulnerable places of both discourse, or rather their specific problems in the middle lane. And this is just the beginning: the history of the analyst breaks out (although it continues to flicker in the following chapters) to give way to the next short story, revealing like a nesting doll with a portrait of Obama and folding into a certain metatex: not a whole narrative and not a collection of stories, but a garden of diverging paths that invariably lead to one well -known geographical point.

Photo: pelevin.nov.ru

The expectation of a new Pelevin is always, among other things, a calculation of a new dose of socially oriented wit, “chronicle-tensions-bonds” in puns and jokes, and Pelevin works out, carefully inserting hits beloved by fans into the concert: the RBC logo, a converted slogan of “rain”, hints of Donbass and Syria-but Syria-but Syria-but Obviously, this does not start it. It seems that the author has been distracted from biased tracking of trends, as well as from risky experiments on the study of social networks from the inside; The Moscow fashionista, who prefers Bailis, as if prompted by other drinks: the accuracy in the details this time is not the main thing. Pelevin is interested in the entities of a more timeless plan - primarily money. Money is not in the sense of “cache”, “assets”, not as a source of status and an engine of consumption, but as an abstract entity, an oversight financial stream, unknowable and unpredictable - and with sufficient power to force the world to rotate around itself. The critic Lev Danilkin once came up with writing about literature through financial terminology, “futures” and “derivatives”, now Pelevin enters a new round, trying to explain the derivatives as a religious phenomenon, the Hegelian Absolute, in which all the contradictions converge; Liberals and Vata, Russia and the West, the strength of the night and the strength of the day are not just glare on the surface of the void, but also (and mainly) energy sources that make the quotes move up and down.

Pelevin is working out the number, gently inserting the hits beloved by fans into the concert program: the RBC logo, converted slogan “Rain”, hints of Donbass and Syria - but obviously, this is not turning it on

A separate question is where in this scheme a place for Russia, again, taken not as a heavenly third Rome, but as a Russian Federation of 2016, a state from which it is not clear what to expect in ambiguous relations with the “Western partners” and the “world community”, and, therefore, the Pelevin exciting the dollar -centered world order. “Mafusail’s lamp” is a book that is surprisingly little saying about the individual salvation or fate of the soul, in the body of Pelevin’s texts, this is more like “philosophical letters”, meditation over the ruts, according to which Russian history moves with languid inevitability, and over the points of its intersection with the world autoban. The struggle of Westerners and Slavophiles (which are invariably found in the queue of the cash register), the secret police seeking contact with the ancient occult forces (in order to even more effectively dilute and throw the forced population), reasoning about a special path and a geopolitical mission (causing laughter or zevot); Pelevin disrupts the masks not from the phantoms of the human mind as such - but from the creatures of the local historiosophical tradition: the whole essence of the civilizational alternative proposed by Russia is to take a certain modus of being from the West, to declare it insignificant, and then fall compared to it to a completely shameful bottom. Perhaps it is worthwhile to de -energize the rusophobia detectors who blinked at this place; To the current West - and especially the practices of political correctness - the author treats no less skepticism: a ban on words, repressions in relation to the tongue lead to the same frustration and misfortunes - as well as geopolitical phantoms taken from a log ceiling. However, Pelevin's dialectics, not only in the ability to declare all the opposites equally idiotic, the author masterfully changes the decorations-from metaphysical despair to the promise of unspeakable grace, and after the description of the meaningless cords of the FSB, CIA and some htonic devils here is the shortage of the Podlepinsky “icing”, one With an elegant gesture, explaining not only the meaning of the permanent self -destruction of the nation in the Gulag - but also the emergence of a psychedelic revolution, the origin of thieves tattoos, the secret of nuclear trials on the New Earth and God knows what else, not excluding the place, time and consequences of God's age that has fallen on our age.

As Pavel Pepperstein already said on these pages, the reader needs not information, but a transformation; And no matter how familiar the tracklist may seem, it is impossible to remain the same, having listened to this album to the end; Through banalities, self -regenerators, metaphysical fog and jokes, imprisoned by a middle -level manager, Pelevin still manages to shift optics, dissect familiar things at an incredible angle. Perhaps the lamp declared in the title not to destroy the wall and not to illuminate the dark side of the moon-in fact, the book itself that times do not contribute to such breakthroughs, but the dynamics of the author’s course definitely allows, having reached the bottom, to make a compliance, and at times even punch a psychologically important mark, and not the fact that there are more secured investments on the market, with current volatility.