Între materialitate și spiritualitate în romanul lui Viktor Pelevin „Žizn’ nasekomyh”
Between materiality and spirituality in Viktor Pelevin's novel "The Life of Insect"

Summary/Abstract: With an impressively complex structure, a diversity of characters and themes, Pelevin’s novel The Life of Insects reveals itself as a social satire, which presents the paradoxical human nature at the intersection of insect biology and human psychology. Written in 1993, the novel depicts the transformations of the Russian national archetype, transformations made possible by the shift in the political and cultural paradigms of a nation that emerges from Communism to greet the new era of Capitalism. On this background, Pelevin discusses sensitive matters concerning the Russian society, thus questioning the much debated notion of Slavophilism among others, and draws attention to a more general theme, that of the human nature. The writer seems interested in revealing the continuous oscillation between the physical, more animalistic side, enforced by the wild capitalism, and the other philosophical, more introverted side, that emerges from the human cultural heritage. Combining highly contradictory elements – the concepts of the Newtonian paradigm and beliefs rooted in mysticism – the author creates collages which aim at recreating the hypothesis of a fragmented postmodern reality, found on the brick of chaos. The absurdity of existence, the diversity of elements, as well as the multitude of broken pieces of reality confer Pelevin’s writing the status of a traditional postmodernist novel.

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