Looking For A Real World In The Unreal World

As Russian postmodernist writer Victor Pelevin's masterpiece, Chapaev and Void is the first Zen novel in Russian literary history. It describes a hero called Peter Pustota, who examines the space-time from 1919 to 1990 in the view of a refugee of being. The world is plunged into a magical change in the process of the hero's shuttling back and forth from post-October-Revolution Russia to the Russia of 1990.The dissertation illustrates the characteristics of the postmodernist poetics from the following aspects:The Pelevin phenomenon. It is universally deemed as an idol effect which is triggered by the brisk sale of his writings. However, the idol effect is just a presentation. The present research attempts to probe the relationship between the Pelevin phenomenon and the postmodernist culture of Russia. In this way the author elevates the phenomenon to a postmodernist poetics height.An analysis of intertextuality. Whereas the dissertation proves the novel is an intertext, it makes a profound analysis of the relationship between hypertextuality and montage thinking. The author thinks that pastiche leads to the birth of anti-hero.The game theory. Grounded on the abstract character of the postmodernist game, the dissertation confines the concept of postmodernist game to transcendental things, i.e. to the category of ontology. Pelevin tries to testify that by using a concrete game that is hidden in the novel abstract postmodernist games can be expressed by words like A person plays a game.Trance as an impression of reality. By ascertaining the similarities between postmodernist ideas and Zen philosophy, the dissertation concludes that Chapaev and Void is a postmodernist text with Zen touches and construes the proposition that the world is a fantasy by portraying abstract things such as the train, etc.