Surviving in post-Soviet Russia: Magical realism in the works of Viktor Pelevin, Ludmila Petrushevskaya, and Ludmila Ulitskaya

The genre of magical realism has received a lot of attention in recent years, and critics continue to struggle with its definition and its historical and cultural location. This dissertation challenges the view that magical realism can only flourish in the countries of Latin America, Africa, and the Caribbean and argues that there are many modes of magical realism that vary by geographical region and historical period. Relying on cultural studies and composition theories, and particularly on Bennett and Woollacott's concept of the reading formation this dissertation reviews a large number of Latin American and European magical realist texts and positions them within various political, economic, and social contexts. It identifies several prominent functions that these texts perform, which include undermining dominant discourse by tracing the unsaid and unseen of the culture and giving voice to the margins' healing wounds caused by tragic historical events; serving as a vehicle for globalization by promoting social political, and economic status quo; responding to rapid and significant societal changes and offering unique ways to negotiate new, unfamiliar, and traumatic situations.; The largest portion of this dissertation is devoted to illuminating the functions of magical realism in a specific political, economic, and social context of Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the region where the genre thrives but receives little critical attention. Prominent Russian authors like Viktor Pelevin, Ludmila Petrushevskaya, and Ludmila Ulitskaya choose to deal with the perpetual ideological crisis by writing in the genre of magical realism with its focus on the inner world of human experience; disruption of temporal and spatial categories; a wide use of intertextuality; attentiveness to the stylistic rather than the ideological aspects of prose; unique vocabulary and a freer approach to language. While some critics claim that the goal of Russian magical realism is the achievement of blissful indifference, its most remarkable quality seems to be its therapeutic function and the attempt to compensate for lost reality by creating an alternative transculture that offers the disillusioned Russian population a new myth as a means to deal with the painful political, economic and social changes.