The Cult of the Image: Reason and Religion in Viktor Pelevin’s “Homo Zapiens”
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.6093/sigma.v0i6.9479Keywords:
religion, advertising, postmodernism, intellectual heroAbstract
The reprise of ancient religious tropes in Viktor Pelevin’s Homo Zapiens (1999) constitutes the main figural structure for the representation of post-soviet Russia, that, after the dissolution of the USSR and the introduction of capitalism, devotes itself to an alienating literal cult of the advertising image. By a close reading of the text and its symbolic structures (like the presence of “places of worship”, the appearance of “sacred texts” dictated by non-human entities, or the reoccurring condition of hallucination), the essay aims to show how Pelevin realizes the representation of the advertising “religion” on the symbolic level more than on the plot level. At the same time, by exposing the connections between Homo Zapiens and several classics of the Russian literary tradition, from which it extracts large amounts of quotes and materials (Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Zamyatin and Bulgakov), the essay will show how the author, with a move that is both fully postmodernist and anti-postmodernist, employs the patchwork of quotations from 19th- and 20th-century novels as a way to actualize the archetypal dilemma of the intellectual hero facing the conflict between faith and reason: a conflict that Pelevin sees as a crucial interpretative frame of the contemporary era.
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