46 интервью с Пелевиным. 46 интервью с писателем, который никогда не дает интервью

In October, the same Booker drama was tediously repeated when ’’Generation P’’ was ignored by the judges. When asked about it, Pelevin was imperiously unconcerned. ’’I expect nothing less from the literary establishment,’’ he said. ’’They know I have no interest in their world of committees, reviews and prizes. All I can say is that my books have now sold almost one million copies in Russia. I have my readership. The Booker means nothing to me.’’

While he may disparage his critics as ’’incredibly stupid, mean, venomous,’’ Pelevin has deliberately detached himself from the Russian literary mainstream, refusing to attend parties, readings or conferences. He reads very few, if any, of his peers. He cites the Russian satirist Mikhail Bulgakov as an influence, yet expresses deeper affection for foreign writers: Franz Kafka, Hermann Hesse and, even more unfashionably, Robert M. Pirsig, author of ’’Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.’’ ’’I want no part of any literary world,’’ Pelevin told me. ’’The only thing that matters to me is trying to produce something that’s true to my vision and that people want to read. To me celebrity is virtual. That you have your picture in the papers. Big deal.’’

In his own country, at least, Pelevin never gives interviews and refuses to be photographed or appear on television or radio. Very few people even know what he looks like. What he desires most — or so he claims — is to be ignored, to be left alone in peace to write and dream. ’’Part of the attraction of Buddhism for me is that it enables me to empty my head of all the junk of modern living,’’ he says. ’’I really hate all the attention. It’s harmful to me and stops me from getting on with my work. I can only begin writing again once I know that people have forgotten about me.’’

Such willed withdrawal from the ephemera of celebrity culture to which Russia is as much attached as any country in the West has, naturally, only increased Pelevin’s allure. Who is this reclusive Buddhist in the dark glasses who writes such strange, penetrating novels? Is he for real? Russian Vogue was so eager to secure an interview with Pelevin this past summer that a senior editor invited him out for lunch and then secretly recorded their entire conversation. She confessed her subterfuge only at the end of their lunch. ’’By then,’’ Pelevin says: ’’I was too drunk to care.’’ As for the ever-present dark glasses, he says, ’’I’m naturally shy. I hate physical attention. It’s torture. I’m wearing these sunglasses now while I’m talking to you and in pictures because it’s the only way I can be photographed without being photographed, if you see what I mean.’’

Pelevin and I are chatting in a sushi bar on the old Arbat, the main tourist drag of the city. After a late summer heat wave during which temperatures climbed uncharacteristically into the low 90’s, the severe cold has returned. The extremity of the weather finds an echo in the extremity of life in the city itself: there is war in the Caucasus, unease on the streets after a terrorist bombing campaign and gossip about the ailing Yeltsin giving way to Putin, a former K.G.B. hardliner, a succession that would take place, symbolically, on the very last day of the old century. The new Moscow seems to be passing inexorably through its Weimar phase — it is an intoxicating, dangerous place, where taxes and wages go mostly unpaid, where citizens openly drive stolen cars and where voracious prostitutes, their lips swelled by collagen injections, patrol the corridors of the international hotels.

Pelevin remains at once exhilarated and repelled by this near-anarchy. In September, he packed up again, first staying two months in Germany before moving on to South Korea, where he planned ’’to avoid the millennium hype’’ by spending the winter months deep in meditation among the Buddhist monks. ’’When I’m away in Korea, spending all day meditating, everything in the world seems to disappear into silence,’’ he says. ’’I stop smoking, I’m disciplined and I can concentrate on what’s important. Living in Russia drains you if you’re an intelligent person. We have no civil society, and people have no protection from corrupt rule. Ordinary people are much worse off than they were under Communism; you simply cannot survive on your pension or money from the state.’’ Pelevin himself is fortunate; he now earns around $50,000 a year from his writing, making him wealthy by typical Russian standards — and allowing him to escape the country for months at a time.