Victor Pelevin

[Alexandre Bougakov]

Hello, Max

Pelevin is famous modern Russian writer, his books are very
interesting but a little bit hard to read even for Russians.

He writes good essays and novels with interesting commixture
of reality and fiction - try to read his works and you will
see it.

Some of his works can probably be found at http://lib.ru (at
"Moshkov's electronic library" - by the way, this collection
is HIGHLY RECOMMENDED for all SEELANGERS, who are interested
in reading Russian texts - it contains about 1Gb of plain
text. For comparsion, Shakespeare wrote only 8Mbytes of
plain text for all his life. To my regret this library was
created by the real UNIX-guru, so the site's design is very
poor.) 

As far as I remember, there was a website www.pelevin.ru
dedicated to his works, but it was "under construction" for
a very long time and I don't know in what conditions is it
now.

If you want to read some of his works, start with "Жёлтая
стрела" ("Zheltaya strela"), "?????? и Шестипалый" ("??????
i Schestypalyj" - sorry, I don't remember the exact name of
this novell) and his major work - "Generation ' П ' "
("Generation ' P ' " - p means Pepsi). Better don't read
"Чапаев и Пустота" ("Chapaev i Pustota"), "Омон Ра" ("Omon
Ra") и "Жизнь насекомых" ("Zhisn' nasekomyh") in the
beginning or don't read them at all - they are really
diffcult to read.

Sincerely yours,
Alexandre Bougakov <mailto:bougakov at mail.ru>
Student of the sociological faculty of the Higher School of
Economics
(http://www.hse.ru/fakultet/sociology/default.html), Moscow,
Russian Federation 
My website is http://SocioLink.narod.ru/ (thousands of
sociology related links on the Web - in Russian, 
Microsoft Internet Explorer 4 or higher is required) 
My PGP key ID is 0x97F20C99, Key Fingerprint is C83C 5998
F43A BEB7 70DF  B8FC CC5E 960E 97F2 0C99 (PGP version is
6.0.2i)

P.S. Dear list,

have you heard about Boris Akunin's detective stories? This
new series of books about young detective Erast Fandorin
describing Russia in the second half of the 19th century was
the real opening in Moscow this year. You know, now there is
lots of bad detective stories published in Russia last ten
years, and people were really bored with this trash - so the
books describing the best periods of Russian history,
written in very good language have had massive success by
that people, who, as the author himself said, "brush their
teeth every day and don't vote for Zhirinovsky". If 98-99
were Pelevin's years in good literature, 2000 will be the
year of Boris Akunin. You can read more about it at the
"Russian Journal" website at
http://www.russ.ru/krug/20000127_d.html. By the way, this is
No.1 site to start searching something related to modern
Russian literature and cultural events.

By the way, this series can be interesting for those, who
are discussing the teaching of Russian:

> But I wrote a catching story full of suspence.
> I lead the main character through lots of
> adventures as well as the whole Russian
> grammar, words of motion and idioms.

When I was studying English, my teacher advised me to read
Agatha Cristie's detectives. Give Akunin's books to your
students to teach them Russian - it may be helpful and
effective since these stories have lots of action, good
"classic" (but not boring) speech and facts from history and
everyday life.  

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