The Borges subtext in Pelevin’s “Soviet Requiem”

Abstract

While the work of Viktor Pelevin contains numerous references to the oeuvre of Jorge Louis Borges, the influence of the latter on the former remains mostly unexplored. In this article, I attempt a comparative analysis of Borges’ “Deutsches Requiem” (1946) and two texts from Pelevin’s 2010 collection Pineapple Water for the Beautiful Lady: “The Anti-Aire Codices of Al-Ef-Es-Bee” and “Soviet Requiem”. I begin with a close reading of the Borges text, arguing that “Deutsches Requiem” seems particularly preoccupied with a critique of the legacy of German idealist aesthetics of the sublime at a particular historical juncture: the aftermath of the Second World War. This aligns Borges with the post-war aesthetics of Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, that claims that the “legacy of the sublime is unassuaged negativity”. Turning to Pelevin’s text, I trace the formal, thematic, and aesthetic echoes of Pelevin’s recasting of Borges’ concerns into the post-Cold War period of the early 21^st century. I argue that unlike Borges, whose “Requiem” is guardedly ambivalent towards the post-war world, Pelevin’s texts remain ultimately pessimistic, and ultimately agree with Otto zur Linde’s contention that “what matters is that violence […] now rules”.