"Chapaev and Emptiness": reader reviews, author, plot and main idea of the book

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

"Chapaev and Emptiness" is the third novel by the famous Russian writer Viktor Olegovich Pelevin. It was written in 1996 and became a cult work of the author, along with such novels as Omon Ra and Insect Life. As a printed edition, it was published in the largest publishing houses of the country - "AST", "Eksmo", "Vagrius", subsequently the work was voiced and published as an audiobook.

In the article you will find a summary of "Chapaev and the Void" by Viktor Pelevin, a story about the heroes of the novel and a review of reader reviews.

About the novel

This work, according to critics, can be regarded as an example of a work of postmodern aesthetics. The space of the novel is filled with features of chaos and boundless multidimensionality, as well as the impossibility of knowing this world.

As you know, Pelevin attributed his texts toturborealism. The works written in the style of this philosophical, psychological and intellectual prose combine "ordinary" literature and science fiction. In fact, this is a continuation and development of the very "realistic fiction" that the Strugatsky brothers wrote. The starting point of the plot events here are most often fantastic assumptions, while the entire text is usually written in compliance with the canons of socio-psychological prose.

As the reader can understand from Victor Pelevin's book "Chapaev and Emptiness", the modern world is a kind of symbiosis of Eastern philosophical ideas, computer technology, music and examples of technogenic thinking. All this is shrouded in an alcoholic cloud and seasoned with "nonsense", by which they usually mean narcotic substances and even poisonous mushrooms. All this could not but split the consciousness of the hero of the work, who, with all this, continues to think about the eternal questions of life.

Author's comment on the cover:

This is the first novel in world literature set in absolute emptiness

- seems to assert the impossibility of any true teaching. For, according to Viktor Pelevin,

freedom is only one when you are free from everything that the mind builds. This freedom is called "don't know".

The novel is built in the form of a chain of "inserted stories" looped around the main plot - the main character's comprehension of the human truth with the help of Chapaevexistence and enlightenment (satori).

About the plot

The novel tells about events that take place in two historical periods - the Civil War (1918) and the time of the 1990s, more precisely, their middle. The story is told on behalf of the decadent poet Peter Pusty, who, by the will of the author, exists simultaneously in both time spaces.

After meeting the legendary commander Vasily Chapaev in revolutionary Petrograd, Void goes with him to the front to become a commissar. However, in reality (and this is just the 90s), Peter is being treated in a psychiatric clinic and is undergoing an experimental course of treatment under the supervision of Professor Kanashnikov.

The professor explains the essence of his technique to the newly admitted main character: in order to be cured, each of the four inhabitants of the ward must become participants in the events taking place in the inner world - but not of his own - but of his neighbor. Immersion in a strange reality is the key to the recovery of all four - Kanashnikov calls this technique "joint hallucinatory experience".

In fact, the critic and writer Dmitry Bykov spoke quite succinctly about the plot of the novel:

The novel does not and cannot have a plot in the usual sense. The madman Pyotr Void is languishing in a psychiatric hospital, imagining himself as a decadent poet of the beginning of the century. This "false personality" dominates his mind. Pyotr Pustota lives in 1919, meets Chapaev, who looks to Pelevin as a kind of guru, a teacher of spiritual liberation, falls in love withAnka, mastering the cart (touch Anka, he deciphers its name for himself), almost dies in battle at the Lozovaya station (where, by the way, his psychiatric hospital is located), and along the way listens to the delirium of his comrades in the ward.

Characters

First of all, let's name the professor of the psychiatric hospital Timur Timurovich Kanashnikov, as well as the four patients gathered in the ward. In addition to the mentioned Peter Void, the main character of the novel, this is Serdyuk, then the character acting under the name Just Maria and the bandit - the new Russian Vladimir Volodin, who ended up in the clinic thanks to his accomplices.

The novel features many minor but important characters for the story, which will be discussed below.

Peter Void

This is the name of the main character of the work - a poet, a young commissar and a schizophrenic. A sick psyche and numerous philosophical works read by the hero completely distorted Peter's adequate view of the world around and accelerated the process of a split personality. He either imagines himself a decadent poet of an era of flourishing symbolism, or a machine gunner, who, together with Anka, in a militant frenzy, fires from a clay tool across the Universe. The latter is understood in the novel as emptiness and becomes the key concept of the novel, and not just the strange surname of Peter.

Falling asleep in Chapaev's division, the hero wakes up in a lunatic asylum. He is convinced that the hospital ward and the hospital are only his fantasy, but the world of the Civil War is real. But Chapaev assures him that equallyboth worlds are ghostly and Peter's task is to wake up. The problem seems unsolvable, since there is only emptiness around the hero:

– Everything we see is in our minds, Petka. Therefore, it is impossible to say that our consciousness is located somewhere. We are nowhere simply because there is no place where we can be said to be. That's why we're nowhere.

Semyon Serdyuk

This patient, personifying an intelligent, drinking-drinking stratum of society, sees himself in a different reality as a warrior, embroiled in a rivalry between two influential clans, Taira and Minamoto, that took place in Japan in the 12th century. In the course of events, Serdyuk, following the Japanese ideals of faithful service and duty, will try to commit suicide by samurai - hara-kiri.

Serdyuk's craving for a Japanese named Kawabata, who either hires him in a modern company, or initiates him into the samurai of the ancient Taira family, finally convincing him of the need for suicide, once again points to one of the ideas of Pelevin's prose about the alchemical union of Russia with the Eastern and Western worlds.

In addition, Kawabata-san is a clear reference to the famous Japanese writer, Nobel Prize in Literature for 1968, officer of the French Order of Letters and Arts Yasunari Kawabata. His close friend was Yukio Mishima, who, after an unsuccessful coup attempt in 1970, took a desperate step and committed suicide through hara-kiri. Kawabata and, of course, not only him, was shocked by this death.

Just Maria

18-year-old young man Maria, who was given such an unusual name by his parents, carried away by reading Remarque, offers to call himself Just Maria. He loves the cinematic image of Arnold Schwarzenegger and is sure that he is in love with this character. Prosto Maria considers the reason for her forced stay in the clinic to be a sudden blow to the Ostankino TV tower. In this image, Pelevin parodied the image of a generation infected by the endless and thoughtless absorption of Mexican soap operas and Hollywood action films that appeared then in abundance.

The name of the young man is an unconditional allusion to the steady erasure of gender differences, and also, perhaps, to same-sex love. However, Maria is the first to recover and the first to leave the clinic, which, according to reviews of "Chapaev and Void", may well indicate the author's likely hope for a speedy moral healing of youth.

And others

For an ordinary reader, that is, for you and me, the historical past is most often just a set of clichés, established pictures and signs. In this novel, Pelevin reduces much of this traditional set to parody and deprives the halo of grandeur. These are revolutionary sailors drinking "B altic tea" (vodka with cocaine mixed in it); and "enlightened by Inner Mongolia", presented as the bodhisattva Chapai drinking moonshine with glasses; and senile Ilyich; and Chapaev's niece Anka, an emancipated beauty and decadent, flaunting a velvet evening gown. By the wayto say that Chapaev himself is also not dressed like a commissar:

the door swung open and I saw Chapaev. He was wearing a black velvet jacket, a white shirt and a scarlet bow tie in the same iridescent moiré…

Not the last role is assigned to Kotovsky, who acts as a "demiurge". And although Void himself in the novel speaks of Kotovsky's addiction to cocaine, it is this character, according to the general mythological principles of the work, that is responsible for the fate of all of Russia, as well as for its future.

Pelevin's novel "Chapaev and the Void" parodies even the Nietzschean superman, personified by one of the hospital's patients, the new Russian Volodin. Finally, the Ural River itself is not just a river, but a Conditional River of Absolute Love.

Summary in parts

The story is told from the point of view of the protagonist of the novel Peter Void. The novel contains ten parts.

Part one. 1918, the period after the revolution. Void, walking down the street, meets a familiar poet von Ernen, who invites him to visit him. At Ernen's, Peter talks about how he was almost arrested by the Chekists for writing a poem. Hearing about this, the owner (who actually also served in this body) puts a gun to the forehead of the guest, also intending to arrest him, but Peter throws a coat over him and strangles him. Then he takes his documents (from which it follows that von Ernen is an employee of the Cheka Grigory Fanerny) and his Mauser, puts on a leather jacket, after which, together with the sailors who have come in, who take him for Ernen,goes to the cabaret "Musical Snuffbox". There he meets Bryusov and the drunken Alexei Tolstoy and discusses Blok's poem "The Twelve" with the former. At the end of this fun shooting event, they drive home, but on the way, the Void falls asleep.

In the second part, the events take place already in 1990 in a psychiatric clinic, where, dressed in a straitjacket, the main character wakes up. The diagnosis that Peter is given is a split personality, as well as his neighbors in the ward. In this part, the doctor practices hypnotic immersion of one patient in the fictional world of another for the purpose of healing. So Peter becomes Just Mary from the soap opera. She walked along the ocean until she met her lover Arnold Schwarzenegger. Then they flew together on a military plane - a "vertical take-off fighter", where Arnold took the driver's seat, and Maria sat on the fuselage. The flight ended for her when she fell from the plane - right on the Ostankino TV tower. In this episode, Peter came out of hypnosis and fell asleep under the influence of a sedative injection.

The third part begins with Peter waking up in Ernen's apartment. It's 1918 again. A mustachioed man in a black tunic, whom he had already seen in the cabaret, is playing the piano in the next room. This is Chapaev. He said that he was impressed by the speech delivered by Peter in the cabaret and invited him to become a commissar and go with him to the Eastern Front. Then they arrive at the Yaroslavsky railway station in an armored car. There Peter meets Furmanov, who is the commander of a regiment of weavers. They are drivingin the staff train to the front. In the evening they have dinner with Chapaev and Anna - "a magnificent machine-gunner", as Chapaev describes her. She says that you need to unhook the final wagon with weavers, which they do. After that, Peter returns to the compartment and falls asleep.

The fourth part. Peter woke up from the fact that someone was shaking his shoulder. This is Volodin. The protagonist saw that he was lying in a bath of cold water. In the neighborhood, also in the baths, lay companions - Volodin, Serdyuk and Maria. Peter learns that they have similar diagnoses. The professor calls this "false personality split." And the professor calls his method of treating such diseases turbojungianism.

During quiet time, the protagonist snuck into the office to find his medical history. The papers indicated that he fell ill at the age of 14, when he suddenly stopped all communication and began to read a lot. Mostly they were books about emptiness.

Considers himself the heir of the great philosophers of the past

- was also listed in the documents.

After Peter returned to the ward, when the quiet hour was over, he witnessed a quarrel between Maria and Serdyuk. He and Volodin tried to pull the quarreling apart when a plaster bust of Aristotle landed on Peter's head. Here the hero loses consciousness.

In the fifth part, he wakes up lying in an unknown room. Anna comes to him and informs him that there was a battle in which Peter received a concussion, as a result of which he had been in a coma for several months in a hospital in the small town of Altai-Vidnyansk. Then they went out for a walk and came to a restaurant, and Peter realized that Anna was in love with him, to which she replied that she had simply come to visit a fighting friend. After that, they quarreled. A bald man came and took Anna away. After this episode, the hero talked with Chapaev, who gave him moonshine to drink. Petr returned to his room and was about to fall asleep, but Kotovsky came to him, who, as it turned out, was looking for cocaine.

Eventually the Void falls asleep and he dreams of Serdyuk tied to a strange chair in the ward.

In the sixth part, Peter found himself with Serdyuk in the subway. The narration is, as usual, on behalf of the hero, but he himself is not in the events described - here we are talking about Semyon Serdyuk. He is recruited as a samurai by a mysterious Japanese organization, where he meets Director Kawabata. After some time, Serdyuk learns from him that the company's shares have been bought up by competitors, so all the samurai of the clan must make seppuku. Submissive Semyon sticks a sword in his stomach. He comes to his senses already in a modern mental hospital.

The seventh part. Kotovsky at the headquarters of the division talks about a drop of wax in the lamp and asks Peter for drugs. The protagonist rides with Chapaev to the Black Baron and enters his mystical camp. The events that happened to Peter in the Civil War and the mental hospital are equivalent to each other - this is how the Black Baron explains the situation to the main character. Thanks to immersion in a trance, Peter and the baron travel through the afterlife and see the dead fellow soldiers. He then falls asleep in his room on his bed.

Eighth part- the story of Volodin. He and two comrades are sitting by the fire in a clearing. They chew dry mushrooms, eat canned food and sausage, drink vodka. Volodin says that the buzz is locked in the person himself, as in a safe. It is impossible to find it without giving up all the benefits. Here the bandits quarreled, began to run through the forest and shoot from pistols. In the darkness, Volodin saw the ghost of the Black Baron. Then everyone involved in the party gets into the jeep and leaves.

In the ninth part, the reader will learn that Peter recorded the previous episode and gave it to Chapaev to read. It turns out that the baron advised the protagonist to leave the hospital. Further, Peter tries to court Anna, whom he met, but she rejects him. In the evening, Void read his poem at the weavers' concert. The performance was met with general enthusiasm. Later, the hero falls asleep, but Kotovsky comes to him, who reports that the weavers are about to set fire to the whole city and that they should leave as soon as possible. Next, Peter with Chapaev and Anna make their way to the armored car. Here Anna climbs into the tower with a machine gun and turns it around. The noise of attack and gunfire subsides. The machine gun, Chapaev explains, is actually a piece of clay with the little finger of a Buddha named Anagama. If you point them to an object, it disappears. This is how his true nature is revealed.

Leaving the armored car, the satellites saw the Ural River, into which they immediately jumped. Peter came to his senses already in the hospital.

In the final tenth, Peter is released from the psychiatric hospital. He tries to get to the "Musical Snuffbox", but inits present is no more. Instead, Peter finds either a pub or some kind of club, orders a drink for himself - vodka with a drug dissolved in it. He writes poems on a napkin and reads them from the stage. Then he shoots at the chandelier from a pen he stole from one of the orderlies - the pen turned out to be a miniature weapon. After all these events, Peter Void runs out of the institution and sees a familiar armored car.

The final episode of the novel is the trip of the protagonist along with Chapaev from modern Moscow to Inner Mongolia:

I … turned to the door and leaned against the peephole. At first, only the blue dots of lanterns cutting through the frosty air were visible through it, but we drove faster and faster - and soon, soon the sands rustled around and the waterfalls of Inner Mongolia, dear to my heart, rustled.

Reviews about the book "Chapaev and Emptiness"

Now you can read both sharply negative and admiring opinions of both professional critics and ordinary readers.

It is known, for example, that film director Alexander Sokurov and writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn spoke negatively about the novel. On the contrary, critic Gleb Shilovsky spoke as follows:

The novel is incomparable, no matter what page you start reading from. … Pelevin's prose is intended for a regular reader. It contains both poison and antidote. His books are a course of treatment, therapy of consciousness.

Dmitry Bykov, already mentioned here, speaks of Pelevin's work as "a serious novel for repeated re-reading." The general idea, according to the critic, is that

Pelevin is looking for a metaphysical explanation for all the most everyday actions and incidents, building many parallel worlds and spaces, living, however, according to one law.

An exotic cactus, grown on the windowsill of Russian culture for no reason, was called the novel by the writer and literary critic Pavel Basinsky. According to him, the entire text consists of "cheap puns", "middle language" and "metaphysical mischief".

According to most of the reviews ("Chapaev and Emptiness" by Viktor Pelevin collected a huge number of impressions left by ordinary readers), the novel is a rather interesting science fiction with numerous references to historical realities. This first impression is, of course, rather simple and superficial.

And here, it seems, is the other extreme: some of those who wrote reviews of Pelevin's "Chapaev and the Void" advise, for a more complete understanding of the text, to start reading the novel only for those who have in their intellectual baggage at least a general idea of the basics of Buddhism - because there are plenty of references to him in the novel. It would also be nice to understand the intricacies of absurdity in literature and generally navigate the history of Russia and the periods of development of its culture.

Without a doubt, the work deserves attention, and many more different reviews about Victor Pelevin's "Chapaev and the Void" will be written.

The fate of the work

In 1997, Victor Pelevin's novel "Chapaev andVoid" was nominated for the Small Booker Prize, became the winner of the Wanderer-97 literary prize as a fantastic work of large form. In 2001, the novel was published in English translation and was nominated (and then became a finalist) for the Dublin Literary Prize. Title "Chapaev and Void " The translators transformed it into The Clay Machine-Gun ("Clay machine gun").

Based on the novel in 2015, a film was made by the film studios of Russia, Germany and Canada, called the creators of "The Little Finger of the Buddha".

Among Pelevin's books, "Chapaev and Emptiness" is the only play based on which has been released on the theater stage for two decades now. The play, staged by director Pavel Ursul, involves a whole galaxy of wonderful actors - Mikhail Efremov, Mikhail Politseymako, Mikhail Krylov, Gosha Kutsenko, Pavel Sborshchikov, Ksenia Chasovskikh and others.

In the article we have given a summary of Pelevin's novel (full version) "Chapaev and Emptiness".