How to Kill Drones with Words: Theurgic Rebellion in Viktor Pelevin's Prose

Goergen 101 (Sloan Auditorium)

Timothy Portice
Assistant Professor of Russian
Middlebury College

Viktor Pelevin (b. 1962) is regularly regarded as one of the most important and well-known Russian writers of the post-Soviet period. Portice will focus on a narrative from Pelevin’s 2010 collection, Pineapple Water for the Beautiful Lady, in which a misanthropic and disillusioned young Russian leaves his homeland to wage a personal war against American drone forces in Afghanistan, armed only with his knowledge of words. He will examine how Pelevin’s protagonist, Savelii Skotenkov, fits into a larger Russian tradition of Russian Orientalist heroes, while highlighting the resonance of Skotenkov’s “word magic” for contemporary Russian and American political discourse today.

Sponsored by the Russian Studies Program