FEATURES OF THEME AND IDEA IN VICTOR PELEVINʼS SHORT STORY „HERMIT AND SIXFINGERS”

Abstract

In addition to novels, short stories (russ: „повести”) represent one of the most significant aspects of Victor Pelevin’s works, which, according to many scholars of contemporary Russian literature, are not given enough attention in the analysis. Although a more detailed acquaintance with Pelevin’s work and chronology of his editions leads to the conclusion that collections of his short stories and narratives represent a kind of „warehouse“ for themes and ideas that the writer later develops into fully-fledged novels, the role of these collections in his poetics is no less. The point is, that the writer uses shorter literary forms to focuse completely on a certain topic, idea or a special method of stylistic shaping of the text, which in novels, due to the specificity of the genre itself, is not always possible. It was this feature that made Pelevin’s stories and narratives, in their own way, the most suitable forms for getting acquainted with the essence of the author’s creative conceptions. Also, it should be noted that although these texts function as „closed worlds“, at first glance unrelated to one another, collections of stories still complete a set of topics that, according to Pelevin, best describes the state of collective consciousness of Russian society in the period when these texts appeared. In this paper we analyse the thematics and ideology of Pelevin‘s short stories on the example of „Hermit and Sixfingers“.